Browsing by Subject "Intellectual Property"

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Open Access
Essays on Corporate Science and Firms’ Interactions with Academia
(2024) Shvadron, Dror
Corporate science plays a critical role in the modern research landscape, with firms making substantial investments in internal research and development and engaging extensively with academic institutions. Understanding the dynamics that drive corporate participation in scientific research is crucial for fostering innovation and technological progress. This dissertation explores the complex factors that shape firms' incentives to invest in science and the outcomes resulting from their engagement with the broader academic community.
The first study examines how firms' ability to capture value from their scientific investments influences their incentives to conduct additional research. By exploiting an exogenous reduction in patent protection, I find that firms respond to weaker intellectual property rights by reducing subsequent research in affected areas, particularly in technologies with thinner markets for technology. This suggests that patents and commercialization capabilities act as strategic substitutes. The results imply that stronger patents encourage corporate research but also shift the locus of research from larger to smaller firms and startups.
Shifting the focus outside the firm, the second study investigates why firms produce scientific research and share it publicly. Using data on corporate publications between 1990 and 2012, I show that external scientists build upon firms' research, producing findings that firms subsequently incorporate into their own innovations. To account for potential bias arising from the unobserved quality of the underlying science, I develop an instrumental variable based on the quasi-random assignment of manuscripts to journal issues. The results reveal that follow-on research by external scientists drives firms' subsequent scientific investments and patenting outcomes, with benefits being more pronounced for technological leaders, firms with complementary assets, and those in emerging fields. Moreover, follow-on research serves to validate the quality of firms' science, which is particularly valuable when there is greater uncertainty surrounding the research.
The third study introduces DISCERN 2.0, a major update and extension of the DISCERN dataset, which tracks the innovative output of U.S. public firms over the past four decades. The new version incorporates several key improvements, including extended coverage to 2021, the adoption of PatentsView and OpenAlex as primary data sources, and the inclusion of pre-grant patent applications and patent reassignment information. These enhancements enable researchers to investigate emerging trends and dynamic effects in corporate research and invention. An analysis of trends using DISCERN 2.0 reveals significant increases in corporate scientific publications related to quantum computing, AI, and robotics, highlighting the growing investments and prominent role of large firms in advancing these science-based technologies.
The final chapter focuses on the funding of scientific training in the United States. Using a comprehensive dataset spanning 75 years of doctoral dissertations, I examine the sources of financial support for PhD students, the fields they pursue, and how funding patterns have evolved over time. The analysis reveals significant shifts in funding sources, particularly within the government and private sectors, and highlights the substantial impact of different funding organizations' scale and subject matter priorities on the share of U.S. PhD graduates in specific fields. Notably, government funding plays a crucial role in determining the annual number of scientists produced by the U.S. higher education system, with an average of 80 additional domestic PhD graduates for every 100 dissertations funded.
Collectively, these studies contribute to our understanding of the key drivers of corporate scientific research and innovation. They underscore the importance of intellectual property protection, engagement with the broader scientific community, and the role of funding in shaping the scientific workforce. By providing new insights and valuable data resources, this dissertation lays the groundwork for further research on the dynamics of corporate science and its impact on technological progress. Ultimately, the findings presented here have important implications for firms seeking to optimize their R&D strategies and for policymakers aiming to foster an environment conducive to scientific advancement and economic growth.
Open Access
Impact of economic, regulatory, and patent policies on innovation in cancer chemoprevention.
(Cancer Prev Res (Phila), 2008-07) Moe, Jeffrey L
Chemoprevention agents are an emerging new scientific area that holds out the promise of delaying or avoiding a number of common cancers. These new agents face significant scientific, regulatory, and economic barriers, however, which have limited investment in their research and development (R&D). These barriers include above-average clinical trial scales, lengthy time frames between discovery and Food and Drug Administration approval, liability risks (because they are given to healthy individuals), and a growing funding gap for early-stage candidates. The longer time frames and risks associated with chemoprevention also cause exclusivity time on core patents to be limited or subject to significant uncertainties. We conclude that chemoprevention uniquely challenges the structure of incentives embodied in the economic, regulatory, and patent policies for the biopharmaceutical industry. Many of these policy issues are illustrated by the recently Food and Drug Administration-approved preventive agents Gardasil and raloxifene. Our recommendations to increase R&D investment in chemoprevention agents include (a) increased data exclusivity times on new biological and chemical drugs to compensate for longer gestation periods and increasing R&D costs; chemoprevention is at the far end of the distribution in this regard; (b) policies such as early-stage research grants and clinical development tax credits targeted specifically to chemoprevention agents (these are policies that have been very successful in increasing R&D investment for orphan drugs); and (c) a no-fault liability insurance program like that currently in place for children's vaccines.
Open Access
The roles of patents and research and development incentives in biopharmaceutical innovation.
(Health Aff (Millwood), 2015-02) Grabowski, Henry G; DiMasi, Joseph A; Long, Genia
Patents and other forms of intellectual property protection play essential roles in encouraging innovation in biopharmaceuticals. As part of the "21st Century Cures" initiative, Congress is reviewing the policy mechanisms designed to accelerate the discovery, development, and delivery of new treatments. Debate continues about how best to balance patent and intellectual property incentives to encourage innovation, on the one hand, and generic utilization and price competition, on the other hand. We review the current framework for accomplishing these dual objectives and the important role of patents and regulatory exclusivity (together, the patent-based system), given the lengthy, costly, and risky biopharmaceutical research and development process. We summarize existing targeted incentives, such as for orphan drugs and neglected diseases, and we consider the pros and cons of proposed voluntary or mandatory alternatives to the patent-based system, such as prizes and government research and development contracting. We conclude that patents and regulatory exclusivity provisions are likely to remain the core approach to providing incentives for biopharmaceutical research and development. However, prizes and other voluntary supplements could play a useful role in addressing unmet needs and gaps in specific circumstances.
Open Access
University leadership for innovation in global health and HIV/AIDS diagnostics.
(Global public health, 2010-01) Palamountain, KM; Stewart, KA; Krauss, A; Kelso, D; Diermeier, D
Medical products used in the developed world often fail to adequately serve resource-limited settings where electricity, transportation and health care workers are not readily available. We suggest that the problem is not only a lack of coordinated financial resources to purchase existing medical products, but also a lack of products that are specifically designed for resource-limited settings. While donor organisations with a focus on global health are increasingly willing to bear the additional financial risk for the research and development of such high-impact medical products, corporations are still reluctant to take their best scientists and engineers away from more commercially attractive projects. Universities, on the other hand, given their teaching and research missions, are well positioned to engage in such high-risk development projects. A group of biomedical, engineering, business and social science researchers at Northwestern University (NU) propose a creative model to address significant social and health needs. The team's initial product focus is a rapid test for diagnosing infants with HIV. The NU model aligns the incentives and expertise of industry, donors and academia to innovate medical products, such as the infant HIV diagnostic test, for resource-limited settings.