Individual Inventors Research Articles

A novel text representation which enables image classifiers to also simultaneously classify text, applied to name disambiguation

We introduce a novel method for converting text data into abstract image representations, which allows image-based processing techniques (e.g. image classification networks) to be applied to text-based comparison problems. We apply the technique to entity disambiguation of inventor names in US patents, obtaining a list of IDs which identify individual inventors with high accuracy. The method involves converting text from each pairwise comparison between two inventor name records into a 2D RGB (stacked) image representation. We then train an image classification neural network to discriminate between such pairwise comparison images. The trained neural network then labels each pair of records as either matched (same inventor) or non-matched (different inventors), producing highly accurate results. Our new text-to-image representation method could also be used more broadly for other text comparison problems, such as entity disambiguation of academic publications, or for problems that require simultaneous classification of both text and image datasets.

Desk and Derrick: The Women's Petroleum Industry Club That Envisioned Oil's Technocratic Future

AbstractThis article uncovers the hidden history of Desk and Derrick, a female-only petroleum industry employees’ club, to emphasize the importance of clerical work and support staff to oil industry development. In doing so, it demonstrates that despite the oil industry's mythology of individual inventors and lucky wildcatters, oil was remarkably similar to other large-scale scientific and engineering enterprises during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, oil's white-collar and administrative jobs expanded rapidly. And in this industry as in others, women were fundamental to oil industry technological development and labor conflicts. Desk and Derrick's was a haven for working women, providing community, training, and leadership opportunities in an industry deeply hostile to female employees. The club provided numerous outreach and educational campaigns included seminars, workshops, fieldtrips, and conventions. These events showcased female competence and technical knowledge, clashing with union derision and corporate dismissal. The club's vocal emphasis on scientific education and credentialization represented a bid for female inclusion within an increasingly technically complex professional world. However, entrenched workplace sexism and union hostility to changing labor structures limited member opportunities. Ultimately, Desk and Derrick's middle-class aspirations allied the club with industry rebranding efforts and helped support industry automation and union-busting. Desk and Derrick valorized industry engineers and scientific professionals, spreading narratives of prosperity through technology that coincided with industry-wide efforts to repair oil companies’ reputations as greedy, wasteful, and exploitative. In turn, midcentury oil companies promoted Desk and Derrick as a convenient, grassroots way to spread their message.

Productivity gains from migration: Evidence from inventors

This paper studies the relationship between migration and the productivity of high-skilled workers, as captured by inventors of international patent applications. Using machine learning techniques to uniquely identify inventors across patents, we are able to track the migration patterns of nearly one million individual inventors across countries. Migrant inventors account for more than nine percent of inventors in our sample. The econometric analysis seeks to explain the recurring finding in the literature that migrant inventors are more productive than non-migrant inventors. We find evidence that migrant inventors become about twenty-three percent more productive after having migrated. The disambiguated inventor data are openly available.

CONSTRUCTION OF OPTIMAL PORTFOLIO USING SHARPE’S SINGLE INDEX MODEL

Portfolio of securities can comprise combination of financial securities. The combination may be equity stock, debit securiti es/ bonds, preference stock, or money market instruments. The well balanced portfolio of securities will give a minimum risk with a maximum return. Constructing an optima l portfolio is a difficult task for the individual inventors. Investor can minimise the risk and maximize return by investing on optimal portfolio of securities. But, construction of optimal portfolio is a difficult task when more assets are under evaluation. William Sharpe has simplified the process of construction of portfolio by relating the return in a security to a single market index with his Single Index model. The aim of the study is to construct optimal portfolio using Sharpe’s Single Index model taking 15 stocks listed at Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). With use of simpl e random sampling the researcher selected 15 stocks from the top 100 stocks listed at BSE. Seven stocks were occupied space in the optimal portfolio of stocks. They are DIVI’s Laboratories (39.17%), Wipro (12.77%), Nestle India (21.12%), Asian Paints (14.96%), Cipla (6.63%), Bajaj Finance (3.8 4%), and JSW Steel (1.51%).

ICIR Euroinvent 2022

Foreword This volume contains selected peer-reviewed articles presented at ICIR Euroinvent ICIR Euroinvent 2021 Conference. The event was held on-site with on-line transmission in Iaşi, România from 26th to 27th of May 2022.The ICIR Conference is organized under the auspices of EUROINVENT. Euroinvent is a joint event promoting creativity in a European context, by displaying the contributions of consecrated schools from higher education and academic research and also of individual inventors and researchers.The EUROINVENT International Conference on Innovative Research (ICIR) brings together leading researchers, engineers and scientists who will present actual research results in the field of Materials Science and Engineering.List of Scientific Advisory Board, Technical and Organizing Committee are available in this pdf.

Technological Emergence and Military Technology Innovation

ABSTRACT To what extent is military technology innovation emergent? This study answers this question by applying an emergence detection algorithm to roughly 300,000 technical terms extracted from military technology patents granted from 1980 to 2019. Emergence – instances of sudden and rapid growth of a technical term within the military patent corpus – is found to vary greatly over time. Military technology innovation during the period of 1996-2008 is found to be highly emergent. This period was found to be characterized by high organization-type diversity; non-traditional vendors, traditional defense contractors, large civilian-facing firms, and individuals generated military patents containing many novel emergent technical terms. However, in recent years, military technology innovation has exhibited markedly less emergence. The period of low emergence is characterized by reduced contributions by non-traditional vendors, defense prime contractors, and individual inventors to military patents containing emergent terms. These observations suggest that policies attempting to ensure a healthy defense innovation ecosystem should seek organization-type diversity and may benefit from employing promotion strategies targeted at distinct organization types.

Breakthrough invention and problem complexity: Evidence from a quasi‐experiment

AbstractResearch SummaryProblem formulation is central to recombinant invention, and problem complexity particularly shapes the process and outcome of knowledge recombination. However, research on the antecedents of problem complexity remains limited. This study examines how breakthrough inventions may serve as an important antecedent of the complexity of problems formulated by individual inventors. We propose that a breakthrough invention may facilitate inventors' appreciation of novel knowledge couplings and improve their overall comprehension of knowledge interdependence for problem formulation, thus increasing problem complexity. We further argue that inventors' prior search breadth and experimentation strengthen the above effect. By exploiting the unexpected victory of AlphaGo and tracking the questions posted on StackOverflow.com by developers interested in deep learning, we find empirical evidence that supports our hypotheses.Managerial SummaryBecause formulating complex problems may result in novel and valuable inventions, it is helpful to understand what drives inventors to formulate problems of higher complexity. In this study, we propose that breakthrough inventions can serve as an important antecedent of problem complexity. In the context of deep learning, we find that developers formulate problems of higher complexity after the unexpected victory of AlphaGo, a widely acknowledged inventive breakthrough. Further, the above effect is more pronounced when developers have broad search experience in the past or engage frequently in experimentation. The insights of this study are not only relevant to managerial practices within the dynamic field of deep learning but also generalizable to broader technological contexts with breakthrough inventions.

Стимулирование изобретательской и рационализаторской деятельности в нефтегазовой отрасли

The stimulation of inventive and rationalization activities in Russia should contribute to the transition of the country's economy to an innovative type of development. The foreign experience of stimulating inventive and rationalizing activities is being investigated. The tools, examples of measures to support and stimulate inventive and rationalization activities carried out at the state level in developed countries are considered. Foreign experience shows that the state supports the system of stimulating inventive creativity, both of individual inventors and creative, scientific collectives. The state acts as a sponsor of innovation activities, the instruments of material interest are used to ensure the acceleration of the introduction of inventions into production processes. Legal and methodological regulations stimulating inventive and rationalization activities in the Russian Federation, at oil and gas enterprises are being investigated. The existing methods of supporting inventive and rationalization activities in Russia are not specialized. The promotion of invention in Russia is regulated by legal acts and a methodological framework partially developed in the USSR, as well as in recent years in the Russian Federation. The main methods of direct and indirect government incentives that can be used to support innovation and invention at oil and gas enterprises: budget financing of research organizations and universities, financing of business incubators, technology parks, public procurement of innovative products and services, investment in the capital of financial institutions involved in the creation of innovative projects, the provision of tax incentives, the allocation of preferential government loans and credit guarantees. The necessity of participation of four levels of management in the process of improving the stimulation of inventive and rationalization activities at oil and gas enterprises is substantiated - the state level, the level of subjects of the Russian Federation, the industry level and the level of oil and gas industry enterprises, which will lead to the activation of this direction in the Russian Federation, increase in its activity, the revival of the high social status of inventors and innovators.

Does Productive Mean Active? The Behavior of Occasional and Serial Academic Inventors in Patenting Processes

Abstract Previous literature has attributed differences in individuals’ inventive productivity to a range of environmental, organizational and individual traits. However, the behavior of individuals with different inventive productivity has not been empirically explored in detail. Based on interviews with twenty Swedish academic inventors of diverse patenting experience, this paper analyses how serial and occasional inventors acted in patent initiation, patent application and subsequent patent management for specific inventions. Two modes of behavior are identified: passive and active. Individuals’ inventive productivity was not aligned with behavioral mode, with both modes of behavior exhibited by occasional as well as serial academic inventors. Individual academic inventors also varied in mode of behavior across different patent processes. These findings suggest that commonly used volume-based classifications of academic inventors obscure potentially relevant behavioral differences. This insight has implications for contemporary policy and organizational practice. It also highlights the need for further investigation of when academic inventors assume an active or passive mode of behavior in processes of academic commercialization.

Who deviates? Technological opportunities, career concern, and inventor's distant search

AbstractResearch SummaryWhy do inventors facing similar feedback from the technological environment differ in their propensity to search locally or distantly? Problem‐driven decision calculus tends not to sufficiently explain such heterogeneity. We instead examine the individual inventor's calculus surrounding career concern. We propose that with reduced technological opportunities in her local domains, the ensuing career concern induces her to search distantly. This response is attenuated when career concern is less salient—she is relatively productive within the firm or is a star—or when opportunity cost of response is higher—she has more firm‐specific experience or interdependent knowledge. Data from the US electronic industry support our propositions. Findings help explain differential search in response to common problems and illustrate how personal interest intermingles with problem‐driven feedback driving search.Managerial SummaryA firm relies heavily on its inventors' search for new, distant technologies to stay on technological frontiers. Faced with technological decline, which of its inventors will engage in this distant search? We bring inventors' career concern into consideration and use data from the US electronic industry to show that, counterintuitively, it is the relatively less‐productive, nonstar inventors with less firm‐specific inventive experience or less interdependence with the rest of the firm's technologies that will more likely engage in distant search. This stresses that managers, in trying to comprehend their inventors' behavior and mindsets, must go beyond understanding how inventors interpret technological problems they are trying to solve, to also consider these inventors' personal concerns which will affect the way they search.

Intellectual Property Rights & New Venture Performance: Empirical Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Different intellectual property right (IPR) protection regimes exist across countries and over time, and it is likely that these regimes influence commercialization of inventions. There has been much debate regarding the appropriate IPR for IP developed at universities. Two fundamentally different regimes have been in place, one attributing ownership to the individual inventor, and the other to the institution where the inventor works. Both regimes have their proponents. Yet, evidence concerning the effectiveness of these two IPR regimes has remained limited. In 2003, the IPR regime in Norway was transferred from one model to the other. This change created an opportunity to investigate the influence of these two IPR regimes on the performance of new ventures established. In this paper, adopting a natural experiment design and using a longitudinal sample of nearly the whole population of academic spin-offs in Norway from 1999 to 2014, we test the impact of the IPR regimes on different performance metrics of new firms. We also examine how firm-specific contingencies affect this relationship.

Breathing New Life into the German Utility Model System in the Industry 4.0 Era

Abstract Key players of Industry 4.0, high-tech firms and individual inventors, do not use patents to exclude others due to the open source philosophy and the risk of a counter-infringement assertion. These key players have developed new uses of patents: (1) defensive use to avoid litigation and (2) proactive use to promote open innovation. They want to be rewarded with the freedom to operate instead of monopoly profits through exclusivity. To better serve the key players in light of these new uses, the German utility model system should be reformed by incorporating a statutory license to implement the open source philosophy and adopting a simplified claiming and disclosure format. The current German translation requirement should be removed to globalize the system.

Taxation and Innovation in the Twentieth Century

Abstract This article studies the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the United States over the twentieth century. We build a panel of the universe of inventors who patented since 1920, and a historical state-level corporate tax database with corporate tax rates and tax base information, which we link to existing data on state-level personal income taxes and other economic outcomes. Our analysis focuses on the effect of personal and corporate income taxes on individual inventors (the micro level) and on states (the macro level), considering the quantity and quality of innovation, its location, and the share produced by the corporate rather than the noncorporate sector. We propose several identification strategies, all of which yield consistent results. We find that higher taxes negatively affect the quantity and the location of innovation, but not average innovation quality. The state-level elasticities to taxes are large and consistent with the aggregation of the individual-level responses of innovation produced and cross-state mobility. Corporate taxes tend to especially affect corporate inventors’ innovation production and cross-state mobility. Personal income taxes significantly affect the quantity of innovation overall and the mobility of inventors.

Inventorship Standards for Biotechnology Inventions Under the U.S. and Japanese Patent Acts

This article highlights differences between the United States and Japanese inventorship standards by comparing a U.S. Federal Circuit decision and a Tokyo District Court decision in which inventorship of the same invention was disputed. It further discusses how Japanese courts, by applying Japanese inventorship standards, would not find one of the U.S. researchers in this case to be inventors, despite the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) finding inventorship while applying the U.S. standard. It argues that the U.S. standard is over-inclusive by including individuals who did not contribute to any part of the inventive process, but that the Japanese standard is too difficult to meet and may exclude inventors who made an important contribution. The over-inclusive U.S. standard is influenced by the legacy of “first-to-invent”: a formality requirement that all individual inventors must contribute to every claim to file a single application and a substantive requirement that an inventor’s prior joint invention is the prior art against her later invention unless the same group of individual inventors made both inventions. The article concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of applying the U.S. and Japanese standards for determining inventorship of biotechnology inventions and proposes a harmonization of inventorship standards through the leadership of the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Does Alice Target Patent Trolls?

The five years since Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 573 U.S. 208 (2014) have witnessed an explosion in patentable subject matter decisions ‐‐ and in political controversy over the doctrine. To its critics, Alice renders important inventions in medical diagnostics, biotechnology, and information technology unpatenable and therefore discouraging investment in critical market sector innovation. To its defenders, Alice offers a reliable, quick, and cheap way to invalidate weak patents owned by patent trolls, reducing patent holdup and protecting innovators. In response to these debates, we explore how the courts actually use Alice. We construct a unique dataset of every district court and federal circuit decision on patentable subject matter from July 2014 through June 2019 and categorize the patent plaintiffs in each case using the Stanford NPE Litigation Database. Once in court, patentable subject matter challenges are far more common in software/IT cases, and biotech/life science innovations are more likely to survive. Surprisingly, the entities most likely to lose their patents are not patent trolls but individual inventors and inventor‐started companies. Our findings have important implications for current legislative and judicial disputes over patent reform as some of the patent owners most impacted may be overlooked.

Are Individual Inventors Invisible?

The research about the population of individual inventors/innovators in Croatia was carried out with the aim of finding answers to the following questions: 1. How many inventions/patents in Croatia are (not) commercialized; 2. What are the reasons of (un)successful commercialization of Croatian individual inventors' inventions/patents; 3. Is there any correlation between various forms of support for inventors / patent owners and successful commercialization; 4. Could education/training contribute to the successful commercialization of inventions/patents? The research was designed and carried out on individual inventors/innovators in Croatia via combination of online questionnaire and telephone interviews. The acquired data were analysed by descriptive statistics and nonparametric inferential statistics. Based on the results of the research, the literature and practical experience, a typology of individual inventors / innovators has been created. The research limitations relate to the lack of the institutional data and literature regarding the individual inventors. In addition to practical contribution of the findings regarding the public policies, there is also a theoretical contribution to existing literature.

Precocious Inventors: Early Patenting Success and Lifetime Inventive Performance

This paper shows that inventors with an early patenting success have a higher inventive productivity during their remaining career. We use European patent data for a period of 32 years for 1240 German inventors. The patent data are linked with survey data that provide information on an extensive list of individual inventor characteristics and time variant information on work environment characteristics for the same period. We define an early success as being in the fastest quartile of inventors applying for the first patent after completing education or being in the highest quartile of citations received for the first patent. The higher career productivity seems to be a consequence of higher individual ability rather than cumulative advantage. Inventors with high productivity early in their career cannot increase their productivity further but instead experience a regression to the mean. Inventors with a fast or high-quality first patent also experience this regression, albeit at a lower rate. In addition, these inventors do not obtain better resources, such as a higher share of research and development time, larger employers, more voluntary job moves, or more co-inventors, during their remaining career than inventors without early success.

Patent trolls in China: Some empirical data

Prior research found that the Chinese patent system is more pro-patentee than once believed. Patent owners performed much better in both infringement lawsuits and post-grant validity reviews in China than in many other countries, such as the United States and Germany. Also, after a finding of infringement, Chinese courts were quite lenient with regard to permanent injunctions. All these pro-patentee tendencies, together with the rapid growth of China's software industry, cast doubt on the prevalence of troll activities in China. This article analyzes 3435 patent infringement lawsuits decided by local people's courts in China in 2015 and 2016 and provides some valuable insights into two important questions: how often do patent trolls litigate in China, and do they adopt different litigation tactics from practicing entities? Based on empirical data, this article finds that, interestingly, both the number and the size of patent trolls in China are relatively small. Although nearly half (1534, or 44.7%) of all patent infringement lawsuits were initiated by non-practicing entities (NPEs), individual inventors, instead of professional businesses, accounted for an overwhelming majority of all NPE cases (1528, or 99.6%). Patent assertion entities (PAEs), by contrast, only initiated four out of 3435 cases (0.1%) in the two-year period under review. If only patents in the computer industry are taken into consideration, then PAEs initiated zero computer-related lawsuits. Nonetheless, this article does observe some trollish litigation tactics worthy of attention and further research. There were 47 repeat litigants – litigants who initiated 10 or more cases; some performed “commercial enforcement,” asserting patents against multiple small retailers instead of against one large manufacturer; and patent owners, on average, waited for a rather long time before enforcing their patents in China. All these behaviors may introduce bias to the incentives to innovate and put pressure on the overall functioning of the Chinese patent system.

The role of international collaborations in securing the patent grant

Our study examines whether patent applications with international collaborations are more likely to be awarded a US patent than applications without. It contributes significantly to the growing literature that examines from the innovator’s viewpoint the likelihood of securing the patent grant. The analysis focuses on the full sample (almost half a million) of patent applications over the period 2001-2009 at the USPTO, that disclosed at least one EU located inventor, and furthermore, explicitly distinguishes between countries with high and low number of patent applications. Firstly, we find that applications from teams rather than individual inventors are more successful in obtaining a patent grant, and that results are even better for international teams. Our key finding is that the presence of a US entity, either as inventor or owner, plays an important role in securing the grant. For low innovative countries, other types of international collaborations also matter significantly pointing to the benefits for these countries to become more extrovert. We further find that a large part of the US ‘effect’ can be attributed to additional prosecution efforts, as it is evident by continuing patent applications.

How the U.S. Courts View the Rights of Individual Patentees: A Case Study

This article presents a case study of patent litigation involving an individual academic inventor and three manufacturers that were using her invention and marketing it worldwide. The article provides an overview of the invention, the patent covering it, and the manner in which the case was handled at different levels in the U.S. courts. A brief discussion of the recent trends in restricting patent litigation and some recommendations for improving and streamlining the process are provided. In addition, some of the possible impacts of implementing recently suggested measures that bear on the ability of individual and academic inventors to assert their patent rights are also discussed.