Individual Inventors Research Articles

The Impact of University Technology Transfer Offices on Faculty Consulting: Decisions by Individual Inventors

This study contributes to the research on industry-university interface by analysing the effect of technology transfer offices (TTO) on faculty consulting. Using fixed effects and survival analyses, I find a 25% decrease in consulting following the establishment of technology transfer offices at US universities. This effect is smaller for the researchers engaged in consulting prior to the establishment of TTO and larger for the new entrants to consulting. My findings suggest that licensing and consulting are substitutes as the sources of additional income for scientists. This result enhances our understanding of institutional change after the Bayh-Dole Act, the incentive structures of university scientists and their contribution to private sector research.

Filed and granted Indian Patents in dentistry from 2005-2009: A critical analysis and review

Patent policies have proved to be extremely important for several countries to develop. India has achieved its global status since 2005; a critical analysis of the patents at IPO will help us to identify the potential, available for patents with Indian Dental Fraternity. The aim of this study is to critically analyze and review Indian Patents in the field of Dentistry from 2005-2009 for evaluation of status of Indian Patents in Dentistry. A total of 110 patents were scrutinized from 2005-2009 available by IPO on www.patentoffice.nic.in. Following which a preliminary data were collected from individual patents and recorded in a record sheet. The data collected were analyzed using SPSS 16.0 software and were subjected to ANOVA test. All patents scrutinized were applied for dental materials (100%). Company applicants (70%) were the maximum followed by the individual applicants (27.2%). A total of 87.3% of patents had enrolled for International Application. Priority country had maximum favor with USA (39.2%) followed by Europe (36.1%). Single inventors (44.5%) were the maximum followed by two inventors (22.7%). Europe (37.3%) had the maximum first inventor, followed by United States of America (30%) and India (10.9%). Individual inventors were maximum in Europe (38.8%) followed by USA (20.4%) and India (16.3%). Contribution from Indian Nationals as inventors for patents in the field of Dentistry is limited, thus reducing the pace of progress and development. Indian inventors in the field of Dentistry have to go a long way to compete with the fellow mates of developed countries like USA and Europe. Continuing Dental Education programs on Intellectual property rights should be conducted on regular basis especially for Dentist's involved in research.

Can Start-Ups Finish Up?

In this issue of Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes , Xu et al present findings from a search of US patents related to bare-metal coronary stents in an effort to gain insight on how medical device innovation starts and how policies in the United States might help to promote more innovation.1 Of the 245 patents identified by their search strategy for the years 1984 to 1994, the authors report that the most frequently cited stent patents (their measure of patent importance to innovation headlined by the Palmaz and Gianturco patents) were from individual physician inventors working in academic medical centers and their small private companies. They also report a temporal trend that shows, in later years, more patents were granted to public companies. They concluded that policies aimed at supporting these entities might enhance and accelerate innovation because early innovation, in this case, was spurred by individual inventors with their small companies. Article see p 743 It is true that individual practitioners struggling with the challenges of everyday practice are an important source of new-device concepts that can possibly solve an unmet clinical need. However, the journey of successful innovation to maximized impact on public health requires that these early ideas (such as the original stiff, boxcar like tubular stent of Palmaz or the poorly scaffolding clam shell stent of Gianturco) need significant refinement through subsequent innovation (such as the later, industry-based Lau patent of the Multilink stent that …

Origins of Medical Innovation

Innovative medical devices make major contributions to patient welfare, and coronary stents have been among the most important device developments of recent decades. However, the origins of such breakthrough medical technologies remain poorly understood. Using a comprehensive database of patents, we identified all individuals and institutions that developed intellectual property related to stent technology early in its development process. The patents were categorized and described using a predetermined qualitative coding strategy. We found 245 granted patents related to bare metal coronary artery stents from 1984 (when the first patent issued in this field) to 1994 (after the first stents were approved). Each year showed an increase in the number of patent filings: from 1 in 1984 to 97 in 1994. The largest fraction of patents was issued to private entities (44.9% of the total). Public companies, individual inventors, and nonprofit institutions represented 31.4%, 18.0%, and 5.7%, respectively. The top 10 most-cited patents in the field were dominated by 2 private entities, Expandable Grafts Partnership and Cook Inc, organizations created by or dependent on the work of independent academic physician-inventors. Coronary artery stent technology first arose from individual physician-inventors within academic medical centers and their associated private companies. After these initial innovations were in place, the field became dominated by large public companies. This history suggests that policies aimed at encouraging transformative medical device development would have their greatest effect if focused on individual inventors and scientists performing the early stages of technology development.

Early telephone credit claims

Patrick Boucher’s interesting article, “Recent developments in US patent law” (Physics Today, January 2012, page 27), aptly begins by referring to the infamous controversy between Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray over who should have patent rights to the telephone. However, Boucher neglects the other, more significant telephone patent controversy involving Bell: the one with Antonio Meucci (1808–89), the true and first inventor of the telephone, if not its ultimate patent holder.Meucci was an opera stage engineer of modest means. Born and raised in Florence, Italy, he immigrated to the US in 1850, after several years in Cuba. Through a sequence of implausible accidents that started with his attempts to treat headaches using electricity, he developed from scratch a true and complete telephone system between 1849 and 1870. He made the first complete prototype in 1856 and used it to communicate with his disabled wife: His laboratory was in the basement and she was in seclusion on the upper floor. His invention, which he called a “telettrofono,” led to the fabrication and operation of a small functioning but short-lived telephone network in his village of Clifton in Staten Island, New York. In the 1850s he also developed a working microphone and a process to produce adequate electrical copper wires.In the following years, Meucci relentlessly sought investors to commercially develop his invention; to that end he delivered a complete set of blueprints and prototypes to American District Telegraph, with which Bell was connected. Later, when Meucci requested the return of the papers, ADT officials claimed they had gone missing.Meucci established a company that in December 1871 filed for a caveat—a one-year provisional patent—because he did not have enough money for a full patent application. In July 1871 he had been severely injured during the fire on the Westfield ferry in New York Harbor and was hospitalized for several months. His impoverished wife had to sell off even the prototype telephone samples for the sum of $6. Bell filed his patent application in 1876 and had it granted. Meucci fought Bell’s patent in the courts for many years, but he lacked the financial resources to confront the powerful Bell Telephone Co. He was defeated in what many consider an unjust and corrupt trial. The case was “discontinued as moot,” and the matter legally unresolved, because of his death and the expiration of Bell’s patent.The history outlined here is amply documented at, for example, the Garibaldi–Meucci Museum—Meucci’s former home in Staten Island. In Italy, Meucci is acknowledged as the inventor of the telephone, regardless of who the patentee may have been. In 2002 the US Congress recognized his role with House Resolution 269 (http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-107hres269ih/pdf/BILLS-107hres269ih.pdf).The Meucci versus Bell versus Gray affair clearly demonstrates how, for centuries, the patent legal system in the US and elsewhere, far from protecting the rights of individual inventors and promoting innovation, has served the interests of well-organized, capital-backed corporations. The new direction for the patent system—“first to file” rather than “first to invent”—can only exacerbate the wrong.© 2012 American Institute of Physics.

Without Grace: How the America Invents Act Hurts Inventors and Weakens Incentives to Innovate

Years of effort and lobbying by coalitions of large corporations to reform U.S. patent law culminated in the enactment of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (“AIA”). Among other things, the AIA converts the United States’ current first-to-invent (“FTI”) system into a first-to-file (“FTF”) paradigm. The AIA awards a patent — and all of its commercial protection — to the first person to apply for the patent. The AIA also redefines the terms of the patent system’s grace period. Under the AIA, inventors must choose between filing for a patent before their idea is perfected or hoping that no one discloses their idea while they continue to develop their product.This Article outlines the fundamental ways in which the AIA changes how inventors’ rights are protected. Specifically, this Article focuses on how the new FTF system and its weakened grace period undermine new product development and hurt inventors. It emphasizes how the re-designed patent system negatively impacts individual inventors, startups, and small businesses.

Good for One, Bad for Most? Intrafirm Networks and Innovation at the Inventor and Firm Level

A well-established finding in network research is that central inventors within a firm’s internal network are more likely to produce impactful innovations. Complementing such predominant actor-level viewpoint, we examine under what conditions the pursuit of network advantage by central actors contributes to, or detracts from, the innovative performance of the firm as a whole. We argue that the extent to which the benefits of centrally connected individuals spill over to the firm depends on the distribution of network centrality within the network and on the type of knowledge exchanges. We test our predictions by examining the internal networks of 141 semiconductor firms, and the position of individual inventors therein, between 1986 and 2003. Bringing new insights on the trade-off between individual and collective outcomes within organizations, we find that the same network structures enhancing the innovativeness of central inventors often reduce the firm-level ability to come out with impactful innovations.

Induced innovation and technology trajectory: Evidence from smoking cessation products

Economic theory predicts that policies that discourage the consumption of a particular good will induce innovation in a socially desirable substitute. However, the literature on technology trajectories emphasizes the possibility of innovation waves associated with the identification of new dominant designs. We incorporate both of these possibilities in a model of the invention of new smoking cessation products, based on a new dataset of patents on such products from 1951 to 2004. We find that an increase in cigarette tax levels had no discernible impact on the industry-wide rate of invention in smoking cessation products. However, we do find evidence consistent with the emergence of dominant designs having substantial positive innovation effects. We estimate that the introduction of the nicotine gum and patch increased the overall rate of patenting activity in smoking cessation products by 60–75%, subject to a 10% rate of decay. Finally, we show that these products had greater effects on the patenting of corporations than individual inventors.

ENGLISH

The paper analyses the trends in Indian patents filed in the area of chemical sciences during 1995 to 2008. It highlights the importance of patent literature in scientific developments and global trends in patent filings. A result of Indian patent filing analysis indicated that filing in India is increasing in the past few years and many public and private organisations are filing patents in India and in other countries for protecting the inventions. Among India patent filing activities, chemical and pharmaceutical sciences are the prominent areas. Individual inventors and assignees from private and public organisations are filing patents, but in India, Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) is leading patent filer.

The C4 Model of People-Centered Innovation: Culture, Consciousness, and Customer-Centric Co-Creation

Quality in its contemporary incarnation is commonly referred to as organizational excellence, enterprise excellence, business excellence, or performance excellence. While technology may serve as a key enabler of enterprise excellence, enterprise excellence itself is in large enabled by the human dimension both in terms of ideation and effort. The human dimension manifests in many ways, with people-centered innovation representing a critical intersection of the market environment and the enterprise’s human capital or the individual inventor. Innovation in all its faces and forms can be more effectively and strategically attained through collaboration that extends throughout the enterprise, to its supply chain, and ultimately to the marketplace itself, that is, cooperation between the enterprise and the culture(s) it serves via the process of co-creation. Understanding of, sensitivity to, and leverage of culture as broadly construed is an underdeveloped aspect enterprise excellence. As considered herein, innovation contributes to enterprise excellence through conscious and customer-centric collaboration between the enterprise and the culture. As such we explore intersections among cultural anthropology, innovation, and enterprise excellence by more thoughtfully elaborating the interface between the enterprise and the customer (user) culture, including society.

Contributing to markets for technology? A comparison of patent filing motives of individual inventors, small companies and universities

We compare patenting motives of individual inventors, small firms, and universities to those of large firms. We use data from a survey (641 responses) among applicants at the European Patent Office. Our results from regression and factor analyses confirm significant differences among applicant types. The generation of licensing opportunities is rated as being more important if the applicant is a university, individual inventor or small firm. Blocking and prevention of imitation is rated as being less important if the applicant is a university. We interpret that this finding results from the universities' willingness to license under adequate conditions and their tendency not to use their patents for preventing the diffusion of their technology and its usage by others. Individual inventors and small firms place a higher importance on using patents as signals to investors, suggesting that patents are perceived as useful to secure access to the capital necessary to start or grow a business. Among all applicant groups, individual inventors attribute the most importance to blocking as a patent filing motive. This gives cause for concern because individuals who do not manufacture products on their own but, rather, use their patents to block others from production act as patent trolls.

Effect of firm variables on patent price

In this study, using singleton patent auction price data from Ocean Tomo, LLC, we analyse the effect of firm variables on patent price. Patents owned by small firms attract higher price than patents owned by large firms, if they engage in multi-country filings. The patents owned by small firms get cited more than the patents owned by large firms. The patents owned by individual inventors attract a higher price than the patents owned by organisations when multi-country filings are not included. We believe that the lack of resources is preventing individual inventors from engaging in multi-country filings and maximising the revenue from their invention. A larger representative data should be used to replicate the results before generalising it.

A three-phase method for patent classification

An automatic patent categorization system would be invaluable to individual inventors and patent attorneys, saving them time and effort by quickly identifying conflicts with existing patents. In recent years, it has become more and more common to classify all patent documents using the International Patent Classification (IPC), a complex hierarchical classification system comprised of eight sections, 128 classes, 648 subclasses, about 7200 main groups, and approximately 72,000 subgroups. So far, however, no patent categorization method has been developed that can classify patents down to the subgroup level (the bottom level of the IPC). Therefore, this paper presents a novel categorization method, the three phase categorization (TPC) algorithm, which classifies patents down to the subgroup level with reasonable accuracy. The experimental results for the TPC algorithm, using the WIPO-alpha collection, indicate that our classification method can achieve 36.07% accuracy at the subgroup level. This is approximately a 25,764-fold improvement over a random guess.

TECHNOLOGY AND INVENTION.

TECHNOLOGY AND INVENTION.

The Post-Heroic Generation: American Independent Inventors, 1900–1950

By World War I, the public (and later, many historians) had come to believe that teams of anonymous scientists in corporate research and development (R&D) laboratories had displaced “heroic” individual inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell as the wellspring of innovation. However, the first half of the twentieth century was actually a long transitional period when lesser known independents like Chester Carlson (Xerox copier), Earl Tupper (Tupperware), Samuel Ruben (Duracell batteries), and Edwin Land (Polaroid camera) continued to make notable contributions to the overall context of innovation. Accordingly, my dissertation considers the changing fortunes of American independent inventors from approximately 1900 to 1950, a period of expanding corporate R&D, the Great Depression, and two world wars. Contrary to most interpretations of this period, I argue that individual, “post-heroic” inventors remained an important, though less visible, source of inventions in the early twentieth century.

The Post-Heroic Generation: American Independent Inventors, 1900–1950

By World War I, the public (and later, many historians) had come to believe that teams of anonymous scientists in corporate research and development (R&D) laboratories had displaced “heroic” individual inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell as the wellspring of innovation. However, the first half of the twentieth century was actually a long transitional period when lesser known independents like Chester Carlson (Xerox copier), Earl Tupper (Tupperware), Samuel Ruben (Duracell batteries), and Edwin Land (Polaroid camera) continued to make notable contributions to the overall context of innovation. Accordingly, my dissertation considers the changing fortunes of American independent inventors from approximately 1900 to 1950, a period of expanding corporate R&D, the Great Depression, and two world wars. Contrary to most interpretations of this period, I argue that individual, “post-heroic” inventors remained an important, though less visible, source of inventions in the early twentieth century.

Contributing to Markets for Technology? A Comparison of Patent Filing Motives of Individual Inventors, Small Companies and Universities

We compare patenting motives of individual inventors, small firms, and universities to those of large firms. We use data from a survey (637 responses) among applicants at the European Patent Office. Our results from regression and factor analyses confirm significant differences among applicant types. The generation of licensing opportunities is rated as being more important if the applicant is a university, individual inventor or small firm. Blocking and prevention of imitation is rated as being less important if the applicant is a university. We interpret that this finding results from the universities’ willingness to license under adequate conditions and their tendency not to use their patents for preventing the diffusion of their technology and its usage by others. Individual inventors and small firms place a higher importance on using patents as signals to investors, suggesting that patents are perceived as useful to secure access to the capital necessary to start or grow a business. Among all applicant groups, individual inventors attribute the most importance to blocking as a patent filing motive. This gives cause for concern because individuals who do not manufacture products on their own but, rather, use their patents to block others from production act as patent trolls.

Poisoning the Next Apple: How the America Invents Act Harms Inventors

The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, the most significant patent law reform effort in two generations, has a dark side: It seems likely to decrease the patenting behavior of small inventors, a category which occupies special significance in American innovation history. In this paper we empirically predict the effects of the major change in the law: a shift in the patent priority rules from the United States’ traditional “first-to-invent” system to the predominant “first-to-file” system. While there has been some theoretical work on this topic, we use the Canadian experience with a similar change as a natural experiment to shed the first empirical light on the question.Our analysis uses a difference-in-difference framework to estimate the impact of the Canadian law change on small inventors. Using data on all patents granted by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office, we find a significant drop in the fraction of patents granted to small inventors in Canada coincident with the implementation of first-to-file. We also find no measurable changes in patent quality and perform several additional analyses to rule out alternative explanations. While the net welfare impact that can be expected from a shift to first-to-file is unclear, our results do reveal that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the March 2013 implementation of a first-to-file rule in the U.S. is likely to result in reduced patenting behavior by individual inventors.

Investigating Collaborative R&D Using Patent Data: The Case Study of Robot Technology in Japan

The growing trend of collaborative RD they are objective and are particularly appropriate for analyzing the benefits of collaboration. As the identification of the institutions to which individual inventors are affiliated is a particularly time consuming task, we focus on robot technology in Japan since the beginning of the 1990s. Our results are as follows. First, although the level of RD however, we show that there are significant spillover effects of collaboration, which imply an indirect effect on quality. Third, the determinants and motives which encourage firms to decide to engage in collaborative research differ depending on the partner they are collaborating with. In the case of collaboration with other firms, IO theories hold, as the existence of spillovers acts as an incentive. Regarding the collaboration with universities and public research institutes, the validity of capability theory, which emphasizes the quest for complementary knowledge and capability, is confirmed by our empirical investigation.

Herbal drug patenting in India: IP potential

Herbal drugs are gaining worldwide prominence due to their distinct advantages. Developing countries have started exploring the ethnopharmacological approach of drug discovery and have begun to file patents on herbal drugs. The expansion of R&D in Indian herbal research organizations and presence of manufacturing units at non-Indian sites is an indication of the capability to develop new products and processes. The present study attempts to identify innovations in the Indian herbal drug sector by analyzing the patenting trends in India, US and EU. Based on key word and IPC based search at the IPO, USPTO, Esp@cenet and WIPO databases, patent applications and grant in herbal drugs by Indian applicants/assignees was collected for the last ten years (from 1st January 2001 to 31st October 2010). From this collection patents related to human therapeutic use only were selected. Analysis was performed to identify filing trends, major applicants/assignees, disease area and major plant species used for various treatments. There is a gradual increase in patent filing through the years. In India, individual inventors have maximum applications and grants. CSIR, among research organizations and Hindustan Unilever, Avesthagen, Piramal Life Science, Sahajanand Biotech and Indus Biotech among the companies have the maximum granted patents in India, US and EU respectively. Diabetes, cancer and inflammatory disorders are the major areas for patenting in India and abroad. Recent patents are on new herbal formulations for treatment of AIDS, hepatitis, skin disorders and gastrointestinal disorders. A majority of the herbal patents applications and grants in India are with individual inventors. Claim analysis indicates that these patents include novel multi-herb compositions with synergistic action. Indian research organizations are more active than companies in filing for patents. CSIR has maximum numbers of applications not only in India but also in the US and EU. Patents by research organizations and herbal companies are on development of new processes for active compound isolation and standardization of such components in addition to new compositions for therapeutic use. Pharmaceutical companies such as Ranbaxy, Lupin and Panacea Biotec are increasingly patenting on herbal drugs. There is increased patenting activity related to diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, asthma and arthritis in India and abroad.