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Globalization should provide firms with an opportunity to leverage their know-how and reputation across countries to create value. However, it remains challenging for them to actually capture that value using traditional Intellectual Property (IP) tools. In this paper, we document the strong growth in patents, trademarks, and industrial designs used by firms to protect their IP globally. We then show that IP protection remains fragmented; the quality of IP applications might be questionable; and developing a comprehensive IP footprint worldwide is very costly. Growing numbers of applications are causing backlogs and delays in numerous Patent and Trademarks Offices and litigation over IP rights is expensive, with an uncertain outcome. Moreover, local governments can succeed in transferring value to local firms and influencing global market positions by using IP laws and other regulations. In essence, the analysis shows a global IP environment that leaves much to be desired. Despite these challenges, there are successful strategies to capture value from know-how and reputation by leveraging an array of IP tools. These strategies have important implications for management practice, as we discuss in our concluding section. Global companies will need to organize cross-functional value capture teams focused on appropriating value from their know-how and reputation by combining different institutional, market, and nonmarket tools, depending on the institutional and business environment in a particular region.

This chapter examines the role of “continuations” (procedural revisions of patent applications) within software patents and overall patenting in the United States during 1987–1999. Our research represents the first effort of which we are aware to analyse data on continuations in software or any other patent class, and as such provides information on the effects of 1995 changes in the U.S. patent law intended to curb “submarine patenting.” Our analysis of all U.S. patents issued 1987–1999 shows that the use of continuations grew steadily in overall U.S. patenting through 1995, with particularly rapid growth in continuations in software patenting. Sharp reversals in these growth rates after 1995 suggest that changes in the U.S. patent law were effective. Continuations were used more intensively by packaged-software firms prior to the effective date of the 1995 changes in patent law than by other patentees, and both software and non-software patents subject to continuation tend to be more valuable.

This chapter examines the role of pharmaceutical patents in the on-going support of pharmaceutical innovation. The social value of pharmaceutical innovation and the importance of its sustained growth are explained. The government buy-outs of patents to reduce drug prices for all American consumers while preserving vital drug innovation are proposed.

This paper examines the evolution of Intellectual Property (IP) commercialization in historical perspective. IP Law imposes an incentive structure that determines the extent of societal investment in those assets. From their inception at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, IP has expanded due to the introduction of new technologies. Property rights allocation over these assets has traditionally been assigned to governments centralizing the recognition of such property. For a long period of time, government intervention was critical to allow IP commercialization; hence, the political economy of IP was dictated by the prevailing ideology of policymakers in favor or against market transactions. The resulting clash of ideologies has marked the position of developing countries seeking exclusions from open IP commercialization to obtain temporary relief from foreign competition of technology producing countries, as well as that of industrialized countries, seeking to export their technologies overseas. The emergence of blockchain technology, as a decentralized transaction exchange protocol that makes intermediary centralized institutions (i.e. governments) certifying IP irrelevant over a large portion of intellectual property (i.e., trade secrets and copyrights) will create revolutionary institutions facilitating IP commercialization, such as NFTs. We examine this historical evolution in the context of legal institutions governing intellectual property transactions and technology transfer.

The past few decades have witnessed a phenomenal progress in our understanding of employee mobility as a critical driver and consequence of various outcomes for individuals, organizations, industries, and economies. In the process, researchers have tackled several important issues in conducting empirical research on employee mobility. This chapter provides a critical discussion of the extant literature focusing on five broad areas: identification of mobility, timing of mobility, outcomes of mobility and their operationalization, model identification, and other related issues. In doing so, this article identifies some of the empirical choices and methodologies adopted in prior mobility studies, evaluates those practices, and suggests areas of improvements for the practice. It is hoped that future studies will benefit from this chapter's insight by building on the best practices from the literature while continuously and successfully tackling the issues that have been challenging the researchers on this increasingly important topic of scholarly inquiry.

This study explores the thematic relationships within the field of sustainability of agri-food chains oriented toward Industry 4.0, focusing on the analysis of scientific production, through research articles and technological output according to patents worldwide. Agri-food Industry 4.0 is an expanding interdisciplinary field in which science and technology interactions are increasingly intensifying with a strong link to sustainable development.

This study has used high impact indexed publications (Web of science) and patents as proxy indicators of innovation, which are transformed into two sets of data, reflecting the scientific and technical backgrounds, respectively. On the one hand, both quantitative and qualitative analysis methodologies were used to examine the scientific papers through descriptive analysis, focused on collaborations networks by authors, institutions, and countries, as well as a content analysis of keywords. On the other hand, the analysis of technical background on patent families shows the temporal evolution of technologies with future challenging trends, text mining, main applicants, and geographical examination.

The results show that in the field of sustainability in agri-food chains oriented to Industry 4.0, most research is in the agricultural field in scientific articles, with high impact in climate-smart agriculture. Patent analysis reveals a marked increase in the patenting rate from 2012 and 2013, coinciding with the start of scientific production in this field of knowledge. In spite of the fact that China is the leader country in this technological field, India shows a significant change. Moreover, India is a country that is currently showing significant progress, both in the field of scientific production and in its categorization as an innovative country due to its growth in patent filings.

Brand-name pharmaceutical companies have engaged in a variety of business conduct that has increased price. One of these activities involves “product hopping,” or brand switches from one version of a drug to another. The antitrust analysis of product hopping implicates antitrust law, patent law, the Hatch–Waxman Act, and state drug product selection laws, as well as uniquely complicated markets characterized by buyers different from decision makers. As a result, courts have offered inconsistent approaches to product hopping.

In this chapter, we offer a framework that courts and government enforcers can employ to analyze product hopping. The framework is the first to incorporate the characteristics of the pharmaceutical industry. It defines a “product hop” to include instances in which the manufacturer (1) reformulates the product to make the generic nonsubstitutable and (2) encourages doctors to write prescriptions for the reformulated rather than the original product.

When the conduct meets both requirements, our framework offers two stages of analysis. First, we propose two safe harbors to ensure that the vast majority of reformulations will not face antitrust review. Second, the framework examines whether the hop passes the “no-economic-sense” test, determining if the behavior would make economic sense if the hop did not have the effect of impairing generic competition. Showing just how far the courts have veered from justified economic analysis, the test would recommend a different analysis than that used in each of the five product-hopping cases that have been litigated to date, and a different outcome in two of them.

Purpose – The chapter investigates the effects of knowledge on economic growth at the regional level.

Methodology/approach – We elaborate a view on knowledge as the result of a combinatorial search activity and implement indicators synthesizing the network architecture of knowledge structure.

Findings – Empirical estimations corroborate the hypothesis that knowledge coherence and variety, besides the traditional measure of knowledge stock, matter in shaping regional economic performances.

Social implications – Important policy implications stem from the analysis, in that regional innovation strategies, to trigger economic performances, should be carefully coordinated so as to foster exploration strategies, but taking into full account the technological competences accumulated in the course of time.

Originality/value of the paper – The originality of the chapter lies mainly in the methodological approach, which provides operational translation to the view of knowledge as an outcome of a combinatorial search. In this perspective, the chapter also sheds light on previously unexplored aspects of the relationships between knowledge and growth.

The dynamics of platforms, particularly the eventual need for renewal, are too often neglected. This chapter adopts a four-stage model – Birth, Expansion, Leadership, and Self-Renewal – to analyze the requirements at each stage of the platform lifecycle in terms of its dependence on the high-level dynamic capability categories of sensing, seizing, and transforming. The requirements evolve from a heavy emphasis on generative sensing and planning-stage seizing in the birth phase, through greater emphasis on “seizing” activities and minor transformations as the platform, ideally, grows and stabilizes. When platform renewal is called for, the emphasis returns to sensing future possibilities and generating new ideas for a platform and business model, developing them alongside the existing business, and eventually undertaking a major transformation to restart the platform lifecycle. An awareness of these lifecycle changes can help managers adopt a longer-term perspective on the competitive requirements of their platform-based business.

Systemic industries comprise groups of firms making component products that are valued as complements by consumers (PC, automobiles, aircraft, networking). In this study, we investigate the distribution of research effort across the technological system by individual firms as a basis for building competitive advantage. Our empirical setting is a sample of component makers in the personal computer system. We show that even in a sample dominated by focused component manufacturers, diversified research effort in the broader technological system improves R&D productivity in the component technology. Broad scope R&D in the rest of the system also increases the marginal benefits of research efforts in the component technology, though at a diminishing rate. We explore the determinants of this complementarity between the scope of system level research and the focus on component level research, and derive implications for competitive advantage.