Prior Patent Research Articles

The Influence of Technological Interdependence on Employee Entrepreneurship and Mobility: Evidence from the Semiconductor Industry

The intra-industry activities of employees post-exit from incumbent firms have been identified as an important determinant of industry dynamics and structure. The post-exit founding of startups employee entrepreneurship is widely heralded as an important driver of innovation, firm creation and growth. Similarly, post-exit employee mobility to rival firms has been recognized as a crucial channel for knowledge spillovers. Far less is known, however, about how technology influences this flow of talent. This study investigates one attribute of technology - technological interdependence. Drawing on a unique database of intra-industry inventor entrepreneurship and mobility events as well as patent citations in the U.S. semiconductor industry, I find that the propensity to engage in employee entrepreneurship increases, but to join a rival firm, decreases with the technological interdependence of inventor's prior patents. This study sheds new light on how technology shapes patterns of employee entrepreneurship and mobility with implications for knowledge flows and competitive dynamics.

Applicant and examiner citations in U.S. patents: An overview and analysis

Prior art patent citations have become a popular measure of patent quality and knowledge flow between firms. Interpreting these measurements is complicated, in some cases, because prior art citations are added by patent examiners as well as by patent applicants. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) adopted new reporting procedures in 2001, making it possible to measure examiner and applicant citations separately for the first time. We analyzed prior art citations listed in all U.S. patents granted in 2001–2003, and found that examiners played a significant role in identifying prior art, adding 63% of citations on the average patent, and all citations on 40% of patents granted. An analysis of variance found that firm-specific variables explain most of the variation in examiner-citation shares. Using multivariate regression, we found that foreign applicants to the USPTO had the highest proportion of citations added by examiners. High-volume patent applicants had a greater proportion of examiner citations, and a substantial number of firms won patents without listing a single applicant citation. In terms of technology, we found higher examiner shares among patents in electronics, communications, and computer-related fields. Taken together, our findings suggest that firm-level patenting practices, particularly among high-volume applicants, have a strong influence on citation data and merit additional research.

Scaffold Hopping in Drug Discovery Using Inductive Logic Programming

In chemoinformatics, searching for compounds which are structurally diverse and share a biological activity is called scaffold hopping. Scaffold hopping is important since it can be used to obtain alternative structures when the compound under development has unexpected side-effects. Pharmaceutical companies use scaffold hopping when they wish to circumvent prior patents for targets of interest. We propose a new method for scaffold hopping using inductive logic programming (ILP). ILP uses the observed spatial relationships between pharmacophore types in pretested active and inactive compounds and learns human-readable rules describing the diverse structures of active compounds. The ILP-based scaffold hopping method is compared to two previous algorithms (chemically advanced template search, CATS, and CATS3D) on 10 data sets with diverse scaffolds. The comparison shows that the ILP-based method is significantly better than random selection while the other two algorithms are not. In addition, the ILP-based method retrieves new active scaffolds which were not found by CATS and CATS3D. The results show that the ILP-based method is at least as good as the other methods in this study. ILP produces human-readable rules, which makes it possible to identify the three-dimensional features that lead to scaffold hopping. A minor variant of a rule learnt by ILP for scaffold hopping was subsequently found to cover an inhibitor identified by an independent study. This provides a successful result in a blind trial of the effectiveness of ILP to generate rules for scaffold hopping. We conclude that ILP provides a valuable new approach for scaffold hopping.

COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE, PROLIFIC INVENTORS AND THE VALUE OF INVENTIONS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF FRENCH, GERMAN AND BRITISH PATENTS IN THE US, 1975–1999

The objective of this paper is to test two related hypotheses: The first is that the involvement of both prolific and foreign inventors in the production of knowledge has a direct, positive impact on the collective dimension of this knowledge production as measured by the size of the inventive team. The second is that the involvement of both prolific and foreign inventors has a direct, positive impact on the value of the new knowledge produced. We use detailed information from nearly 300,000 patents granted by the US Patent Office to French, German, and British inventors over the period from 1975 to 1999. From the data available from each patent regarding citations of prior patents and the numbers and identities of the inventors listed in the patent application, we are able to construct measures of collective knowledge, the presence of prolific and foreign inventors, and the imputed value of patents. In a novel approach in this literature, we estimate negative binomial multiple regression models for determining both the size of the collective dimension and the value of the patents. After controlling for the effects of years, technological fields, and patenting country, we find a strong support for the hypothesis that both prolific and foreign inventors tend to be parts of larger teams of inventors and for the hypothesis that prolific and foreign inventors tend to produce inventions having more value. In the conclusion, we draw some implications from these results for knowledge governance.

Knowledge sources of innovation in a small open economy: The case of Singapore

By tracing the flows of patent citation to prior patents and scientific journal articles, we investigate the sources of knowledge for innovation output in Singapore, a small, highly open economy that has traditionally been significantly dependent on foreign multinational corporations (MNCs). We found that the local production of new knowledge by indigenous Singaporean firms depends disproportionately on technological knowledge produced by MNCs with operational presence in Singapore and scientific knowledge generated by foreign universities. Locally produced new knowledge by indigenous firms and local universities/ public research institutes constitutes an as yet insignificant, albeit growing, source for innovation in Singapore.

Assessing the R&D Management of a Firm in Terms of Speed and Science Linkage: Evidence from the US Patents

We evaluate statistically how the R&D management of a firm affects its research quality. Controlling for technology areas, a firm having short citation lag relative to the prior patent literature has a significantly high patent quality in terms of patent citation and the number of claims per patent, suggesting that the speed of R&D mattes. Such an effect is more significant in IT than in biotechnology & pharmaceuticals. A firm having high citations to the science literature has also a high patent quality, indicating the importance of the capability to use scientific knowledge. Such an effect is significant both in biotechnology & pharmaceuticals and in IT.

Court rules on patentability standards for composition ranges

Court rules on patentability standards for composition ranges

Priority patent applications

The Paris Convention allows an inventor to file an initial 'priority' patent application and then to file foreign patent applications on the basis of that 'priority' application up to 1 year later. This year gives the inventor time to evaluate the invention before committing to the expense of filing foreign patent applications.

A Reassessment of the Alternative Regeneration Cycle

Two prior papers and several patents have considered improvements to a gas turbine engine’s cycle efficiency by using two turbines in series with an intermediate heat exchanger that preheats combustion air. This approach allows heating the combustion air to temperatures higher than those that can be achieved with “conventional regeneration” in which the combustion products are fully expanded across a turbine before any heat recovery. Since heat addition in the combustor of the “alternative regeneration” cycle occurs at a higher average temperature, then under certain conditions the cycle efficiency can be higher than that available from a cycle using conventional regeneration. This paper reconsiders the usefulness of the alternative regeneration cycle with more detailed modeling than has been presented previously. The revised modeling shows that the alternative regeneration cycle can produce efficiencies higher than conventional regeneration, but only for a more limited set of conditions than previously reported. For high-technology engines operating at high temperatures, the alternative regeneration cycle efficiencies can be three to four percentage points better than comparable conventional regeneration cycles. For lower-technology engines, which are more typical of those currently installed, improvements in efficiency only occur at lower values of heat exchanger effectiveness, which limits the usefulness of the alternative regeneration cycle. Also considered is an extension to the cycle that employs a second heat exchanger downstream of the second turbine for the purpose of further preheating the combustion air. In its optimum configuration, this “staged heat recovery” can produce additional small improvements of between 0.3 and 2.3 percentage points in cycle efficiency, depending on the particular cycle parameters assumed.

The future of prior art searching at the United States patent and trademark office

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has experienced an increased volume and complexity of patent applications in recent years, with resulting problems in maintaining pendency times and quality. As part of the Office’s 21st Century Strategic Plan to deal with this and other problems, the outsourcing of prior art patent searches has been proposed. In this article the author explains the current situation––including the existing partial use of search contractors, briefly surveys some solutions adopted in other patent offices, and then details the outsourcing proposals. It is intended that the contracting out of searches will proceed initially by means of a proof of concept pilot conducted on the search reports prepared by the Office on international applications under the PCT. Contractors will need to be able to demonstrate technical and legal competence, that there is no conflict of interest between these and other searches they carry out, and that they will maintain strict confidentiality. If successful, a wider implementation will be rolled out, with procedures in place to ensure that high quality searches are provided on a continuous basis. Analogous contracting out of classification and reclassification functions is also described.

The economics of human gene patents.

The author examines patents on DNA sequences, including data on gene sequence grants issued by the PTO during a 33-month period from 1998 to 2001. Policy supporting patents on DNA sequences and other elemental information that are far "upstream" in the product development pathway is contrasted with the economic bases and rationale for patents to pharmaceuticals, which require a protracted and expensive process of development and testing but that can be relatively cheaply and competitively imitated once they are approved and disclosed. How to allocate appropriately the economic returns among the upstream and downstream inventors is a challenging problem for economic theory, as well as for contemporary biomedical research, and is perhaps most familiarly embodied in licensing and cross-licensing disputes involving "reach-through" and "reach-back" rights. Such disputes can generate enormous transaction costs. They may become increasingly frequent and vexing with respect to the scope and overlap of patent claims on human gene sequences. On the basis of his analyses, the author argues that genome patent claims should be interpreted narrowly. He is particularly concerned with ensuring that the development of new (therapeutic) products is not blocked or retarded by a multiplicity of prior patent claims, but he is pessimistic that the diversity of participants in biotechnology will provide a "sufficient community of interest to organize comprehensive low-royalty cross-licensing" regimes. Accordingly, he suggests mandatory arbitration as one mechanism for resolving such problems.

Borehole radar experiment in limestone: analysis and data processing

The origins of rèsearch into the transmission of electromagnetic waves in the ground dates back to the early days of the Study of radioelectricity. It was not until the 1950s, however, that research really began to accelerate. The first subsurface radar results were obtained in 1956 (Cook 1960) in snow and ice and the first satisfactory use of the borehole radar technique was in salt domes (W.T. Hoster et al. 1972) using a prior patent (Friedriksen et al. 1969).

Patent Law Harmonization: The Current Situation and Alternatives Available (Part I)

It is hoped that this rather comprehensive review, of patent law harmonization treaty work in process, will help organizations and individuals evaluate the current situation and prepare recommendations for their representatives, governmental and nongovernmental, who will participate in the final meeting, and in later stages of the treaty process. There is great value in reviewing several reports on this meeting. WIPO has published a report summarizing the 7th meeting of experts on patent law harmonization (more than 90 pages, organized on a day-by-day basis). The present article was drafted independently, from meeting documents and notes taken during attendance at the 7th meeting, without relying on the WIPO report as a primary source.Section I of this article includes a brief explanation of the WIPO treaty process. Section II gives an overview of how a patent system would function with the proposed changes. A chart, keyed to the draft treaty articles, is included to show the functional role of each provision. While this article assumes some knowledge of developments in prior meetings and basic international patent law, it is written for general patent specialists and business persons who want to know what is going on at the patent harmonization meetings. Section III (in Part II of this article, appearing in a subsequent issue) is a detailed review of the 7th meeting discussions, based on first-hand observations, organized by the draft treaty articles. The reader will find it convenient to refer to the Section II chart for a particular topic and article number, and to look up that article in Section III for more information.

The SPE international award address—1973 the development of impact polystyrene–a review

AbstractThe development of impact polystyrene and types of processes used is traced from its inception. Our accidental discovery of the process has resulted in the process being termed unique in that no other commercial polymerization has a like phenomenon that occurs in the shearing agitation step. The prior art and patent picture, before and after the issue of the Dow basic patent, is discussed. The litigation that has centered around the patent is reviewed. Information presented shows that this basic process for impact polystyrene has experienced an unusual degree of commercial success and has led to this family of plastics becoming of major commercial importance. These impact plastics have been accepted and used on a global basis.

Patents. Infringement. Assignor of Patent Held Not Estopped from Showing That Assigned Patent Is Invalid Because of Expired Prior Art Patent

Patents. Infringement. Assignor of Patent Held Not Estopped from Showing That Assigned Patent Is Invalid Because of Expired Prior Art Patent

Electrical musical instruments

My invention relates generally to electrical musical instruments, and more particularly to improvements in the control systems for such instruments, whereby improved musical results may be obtained. The invention is an improvement upon the electric organ disclosed in my prior Patent No. 1,956,350,...

Patents. Defense of Double Patenting Not Available against Mechanical Patent after Prior Design Patent to Same Inventor Is Declared Invalid

Patents. Defense of Double Patenting Not Available against Mechanical Patent after Prior Design Patent to Same Inventor Is Declared Invalid

Alternating-current commutator motors

My invention relates to improvements in the novel types of alternating current commutator single phase motors shown in my prior Patents #2,060,106, Alternating current motor, November 10, 1936, #2,192,050, Alternating current commutator motor, February 27, 1940, and #2,192,051, Constant speed...