Yann Ménière

Invention and Transfer of Climate Change Mitigation Technologies on a Global Scale: A Study Drawing on Patent Data

This paper uses the EPO/OECD World Patent Statistical Database (PATSTAT) to provide a quantitative description of the geographic distribution of inventions in thirteen climate mitigation technologies since 1978 and their international diffusion on a global scale. Statistics suggest that innovation has mostly been driven by energy prices until 1990. Since then, environmental policies, and climate policies more recently, have accelerated the pace of innovation. Innovation is highly concentrated in three countries—Japan, Germany and the USA—which account for 60% of total innovations. Surprisingly, the innovation performance of emerging economies is far from being negligible as China and South Korea together represent about 15% of total inventions. However, they export much less inventions than industrialized countries, suggesting their inventions have less value. More generally, international transfers mostly occur between developed countries (73% of exported inventions). Exports from developed countries to emerging economies are still limited (22%) but are growing rapidly, especially to China.

Greening Global Value Chains: Innovation and the International Diffusion of Technologies and Knowledge

Using novel data on patents, trade of equipment goods, and foreign direct investments and insights from the economic literature, the paper seeks to lay out the state of knowledge on the role of innovation and the diffusion of technologies in the greening of global value chains as well as some of the main policy issues. A special emphasis is put on developing countries -- distinguishing emerging economies and least-developed countries -- and on climate-mitigation technologies. Emerging economies are already reasonably well integrated in the global economy. As a consequence, technologies flow in through the imports of capital goods and local investments by multinational enterprises owning technologies. Pushing further technology transfer requires strengthening intellectual property rights, lowering barriers to trade and investments and improving technological absorptive capacities. In contrast, their role in innovation is limited. Standard tools of innovation policy - public research and development, public support to private research and development, better access to finance - should develop. But studies also suggest that governments should introduce more stringent environmental policies with proper enforcement at home to go beyond the adoption of foreign technologies. The situation of least-developed countries is very different: they do not import green technologies and low barriers to trade and foreign direct investment or strict intellectual property rights are unlikely to trigger technology transfer. In these countries, the focus should be on building technological capacities.

Decentralized Licensing of Complementary Patents: Comparing the Royalty, Fixed-Fee and Two-Part Tariff Regimes

This paper explores the decentralized licensing of complementary patents reading on a technology standard. We develop a model in which manufacturers must buy licenses from different patent owners in order to enter the market for differentiated standard-compliant products. We consider three different types of licensing, namely, the fixed-fee, per-unit royalty and two-part tariff regimes, and compare their performances in terms of licensing revenue, price, product variety and welfare. We show that each regime entails different types of coordination failures. We establish that each of them may maximize the licensing revenue depending on the number of licensors, number of potential entrants and product differentiation.

Technology Standards, Patents and Antitrust

From the perspective of antitrust authorities, the multiplication of patents embodied in technology standards is a source of concerns. Certainly it is necessary and efficient that patents owners derive a revenue from the use of the standard. Yet by their function – ensuring compatibility between different products by promoting a common technology platform in a particular industry – standards generate potential for market power far beyond the legal protection conferred by patents. Patent holders may thus be tempted to leverage their position to make illegal profits. Such concerns arise in two different cases that have fuelled antitrust debates and economic research during the last decade. On the one hand, patent owners may be tempted to collude by coordinating their licensing policies. The difficulty here is that some coordination between them within a patent pool may actually be pro-competitive. After a brief introduction, we explain in the first part why, and on what conditions, patent pools should be accepted by antitrust authorities. On the other hand, patent owners may be tempted to manipulate the standard setting process by waiting for the wide adoption of the standard before charging excessive royalties to its users. We present this hold-up problem in the second part, and show how appropriate rules for standard setting processes can help mitigate it.

Early commitments help patent pool formation

This paper explores in what circumstances patent owners can be expected to join unilaterally a patent pool. We develop a simple model in which owners of patents reading on a standard grant licences to competing manufacturers. Manufacturers must sink a fixed cost to enter the market for standard compliant products, and are thus exposed to a hold up when royalties are set after their entry. We show that the formation of non-cooperative patent pools nearly always fails if it takes place once manufacturers have incurred fixed costs - as is usually the case. By contrast, allowing the formation of patent pools ex ante facilitates the emergence of stable non-cooperative patent pools. Such ex ante pools yield lower prices and higher licensing profits than ex post patent pools would. We discuss the policy implications of these results concerning the credibilty of licensing commitments required by standard setting bodies.

Patents and Innovation: Friends or Foes?

Over 2 million patents are currently in force in the EU and in the USA. Do they testify innovation is blockaded for they restrict freedom in research or do they give evidence innovation is flourishing for patent law provides incentives to invent new products and processes? In other terms do patents freeze or spur innovation? The question arises for massive anecdotal evidence shows the patent system may have turned on its head, e.g., USPTO and EPO examiners spend less than 30 hours per application to assess whether the technical input is useful, novel and non-obvious; as a result, the list of trivial patents such as one-click online shopping is growing each day; some companies, so called patent trolls, have specialized in amassing patents just to litigate and get damage rewards; one of them has recently obtained

International patent families: from application strategies to statistical indicators

612,5 million from the manufacturer of BlackBerry to settle an alleged patent infringement; European patents are translated in several different languages, a costly burden for applicants, although nobody reads the translations. The belief of the layman in the patent system has evaporated. He is at best skeptical on the benefits of patents for society. Economists are not innocent for this change in perception. 50 years ago they established (Nordhaus, 1969) that patent law tends to stimulate RD they focus on a small number of parameters and trade-offs. They do not pretend to embrace a whole system and being able to calculate a net gain for society in taking into account all phenomena they study in isolation. This may misleadingly give the impression that economic theory has now proved that patent law hinders innovation rather than it stimulates it, that is, that absent patent law, innovation will be stronger. The aim of this study is to try to get a clearer picture on what economics enables us to say on the impact of patents on innovation. We are grateful to Air Liquide, Alcatel, Microsoft, Philips and SAP for the opportunity they give us to revisit this basic question. This study has been carried thanks to their financial support. Of course, its contents only engage their authors and not these companies.

Licensing Commitments in Standard Setting Organizations

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of international patent families, including their domestic component. We exploit a relatively under-studied feature of patent families, namely the number of patents covering the same invention within a given jurisdiction. Using this information, we highlight common patterns in the structure of international patent families, which reflect both the patenting strategies of innovators and the peculiarities of the different patent systems. While the literature has extensively used family size, i.e. the number of countries in which a given invention is protected, as a measure of patent value, our results suggest that the number of patent filings in the priority country within a patent family as well as the timespan between the first and last filings within a family are other insightful indicators of the value of patented innovations.

Technology Diffusion with Learning Spillovers: Patent versus Free Access

Recent evolutions have called into question the traditional practices of standard-setting organizations (SSOs), especially as regards the licensing of essential patents. In the trail of recent antitrust cases, doubts have been cast in particular on the effectiveness of the current IP policies requiring that essential patent owners commit to licensing their IP on RAND terms, the latter commitments being now perceived as too vague. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is twofold. We first highlight the rationale of the old RAND regime, as well as its effects when it becomes ineffective to mitigate the holdup problem. We then discuss the advantages of requiring more precise commitments. We especially analyze and compare the effects of two new IP policies currently experimented in some SSO: requiring that patent owners commit on a royalty cap as experimented by VITA, and allowing patent owners to choose freely whether to commit on a cap or an exact royalty, as experimented with IEEE-SA.

Tracking patent transfers in different European countries: methods and a first application to medical technologies

This paper analyses the interplay between technology diffusion and patent law. We develop a dynamic model where initial adoptions generate learning spillovers that reduce the cost of subsequent adoptions. In this setting, we contrast technology diffusion paths under competitive supply, subsidized adoption and patent protection. Competitive supply entails various coordination failures that cannot be fully fixed by public subsidy. We show that a patent holder can internalize externalities more efficiently, insofar as patent protection is fully effective. In contrast, fully competitive supply may be more efficient when patent enforcement is imperfect.