Fabio Montobbio

THE SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTIVITY OF ACADEMIC INVENTORS: NEW EVIDENCE FROM ITALIAN DATA

We investigate the scientific productivity of Italian academic inventors, namely academic researchers designated as inventors on patent applications to the European Patent Office, 1978–1999. We use a novel longitudinal data set comprising 299 academic inventors, and we match them with an equal number of non-patenting researchers. We enquire whether a trade-off between publishing and patenting, or a trade-off between basic and applied research exists, on the basis of the number and quality of publications. We find no trace of such a trade-off, and find instead a strong and positive relationship between patenting and publishing, even in basic science. Our results suggest, however, that it is not patenting per se that boosts scientific productivity, but the advantage derived from solid links with industry, as the strongest correlation between publishing and patenting activity is found when patents are owned by business partners, rather than individual scientists or their universities.

An evolutionary model of industrial growth and structural change

This paper explores the rules which regulate market shares dynamics within industries jointly with the mechanisms underpinning a process of general evolution in which n sectors grow at different rates and structural change takes place. It introduces a selection equation, which allows for selection within and between sectors and explores the forces that can account for the differential growth of different industries. Sectoral and aggregate productivity growth rates depend upon a sorting and a selection mechanism between and within sectors, which continuously changes the relative position of competing firms. This paper generalises Metcalfe’s Fisher Principle (Metcalfe, 1998) results to a multi-sectoral economy.

International Knowledge Diffusion and Home-bias Effect: Do USPTO and EPO Patent Citations Tell the Same Story?

This paper estimates the international diffusion of technical knowledge using patent citations. We control for self-citations and for procedural differences between patent offices using equivalent patents. We find that (1) there are clear biases in patent examination processes that generate citations in the two offices; (2) at the EPO there is a strong localization effect at the country level, and the size is comparable to that found at the USPTO; (3) technological fields have different properties of diffusion in the two patent offices that do not depend on a patent office bias; (4) using EPO data, the US is not the leading country in terms of citations made and received, as occurs at the USPTO.

Open Science and University Patenting: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Italian Case

This chapter addresses the issue of university patenting and its impact on the scientific activity of academic researchers. The issue is highly debated in Europe where legislators are trying to design policy instruments to support the technological transfer from university to industry and to create an optimal set of incentives to stimulate scientists’ productivity. The relationship between patenting and publishing may be controversial because there are as many arguments claiming that the relationship is beneficial to both university and industry as reasons to fear that patenting may hinder the free diffusion of scientific knowledge or bias the scientists’ choice of research topics.

European Integration and Knowledge Flows across European Regions

Cappelli R. and Montobbio F. European integration and knowledge flows across European regions, Regional Studies. Using data on inventor citations and inventor collaborations, changes in geographical patterns of knowledge flows between European regions during the period 1981–2000 are analysed. It is shown that inventor collaborations become less geographically localized, while inventor citations become more localized. The European integration process has a significant effect on reducing barriers to knowledge flows between new and old European Union members. For inventor citations, this effect relates only to the European Union enlargement of 1995 and is confined to knowledge flows from Austria, Finland and Sweden to old European Union members.

EPO vs. USPTO Citation Lags

This paper estimates the diffusion and obsolescence of technological knowledge by technological field, country and type of institutions that generates it. We use two comparable samples of patents and patent citations from the NBER U.S. Patent Citations Dataset (based on patents from the US Patent Office) and from the EP Cespri Dataset (based on patents from the European Patent Office). Using a quasi-structural model, as proposed by Caballero and Jaffe (1993) and discussed in Hall et al. (2001), we test whether the observed processes of knowledge diffusion and obsolescence reflect the specific institutional mechanism generating them. Results show that at the USPTO there are more citations per patent due to the different rules governing citation practices and that their median lag is twice as large relatively to the citations at the EPO. We also find that the relative properties of the citation frequencies in different technological fields change according to the patent office considered.

Guest authors or ghost inventors? Inventorship and authorship attribution in academic science.

Background: Authorship and inventorship are the key attribution rights that contribute to a scientist’s reputation and professional achievement. This article discusses the concepts of coinventorship and coauthorship in the legal and sociological literature, as well as journals’ publication guidelines and technology transfer offices’ recommendations. It discusses also the relative importance of social and legal norms in the allocation of scientific credit. Method: This article revises critically the literature on inventorship and authorship in academic science and derives some policy implications on the institutional mechanisms allocating scientific credit. It reports and assesses the recent empirical evidence on the importance of social norms for the attribution of inventorship and authorship in teams of scientists. Finally, it discusses those norms from a social welfare perspective. Result: The social norms that regulate the distribution of authorship and inventorship do not reflect exclusively the relative contribution of each team member but also the members’ relative seniority or status. In the case of inventorship, such social norms appear to be as important as the legal norms whose respect is often invoked by technology transfer officers. Conclusion: Authorship and inventorship appear to be obsolete because they do not capture the increasing division of labor and responsibility typical of contemporary scientific research teams. The informative value of both authorship and inventorship attributions may be much more limited than assumed by recent evaluation exercises.

How do new technologies emerge? A patent-based analysis of ICT-related new industrial activities

Summary This paper selects endogenously 149 relevant technologies or plaff’orms in the ICT field through a browsing procedure of patents abstract. Innovative products and applications in emerging and non emerging technologies are compared. This paper shows that emerging technologies are more concentrated across countries, firms and technological IPC classes relatively to non emerging ones. University and public research centres do not seem to play a relevant role in innovations in emerging technologies. Finally a preliminary analysis of knowledge sources through patent citations suggests that, among the leading countries, the US, despite a lower patent share in emerging technologies, maintains a strong position in terms of knowledge production. Sweden and Finland also display a good position as knowledge creators.

Dinamica e Determinanti della Specializzazione Tecnologica Internazionale

The interaction between the sectoral composition of the economy, the scientific and technological research activity of firms and universities, and the activity of large firms is considered as a crucial factor of growth in the advanced countries. This paper enquires about the relationship between the dynamics of international technological specialization, on the one hand, and market expansion and profit opportunities, accumulation of technical and scientific knowledge and market structures, on the other hand. We employ R&D and export data, patent applications and citations at the European Patent Office for six countries (US, UK, Italy, Japan, France, Germany) from 1981 to 1994 for 135 technological classes in three industrial sectors (Chemicals, Electronics and Machinery). The econometric analysis uses GMM techniques for dynamic panels and shows that international technological specialization is persistent and is positively affected by the relative effort of firms in R&D, the direction of cross-sectoral knowledge spillovers within countries and by the quality of research output by universities and public research centres. The size of the estimated relationships differs across the three industrial sectors. In addition, the paper shows that the concentration of innovative activities may have a negative impact on international technological specialization.

Inventor mobility and productivity in Italian regions

ABSTRACT This paper describes the interregional and international mobility of inventors in Italy and estimates its impact on total factor productivity (TFP) at the regional level for the period 1996–2011. A new database of mobile inventors is constructed and, using a set of geographically based instruments to address endogeneity, it shows that inventor in- and outflows affect regional TFP growth. Moreover, the positive effects of the inventors’ mobility (inflow) between different applicants take more time to materialize (relative to movements within the same company). Finally, the negative effects of inventor outflows are mainly driven by mobility between applicants.