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    PatentsRemove Patents →

    New research on patents from Harvard Business School faculty on issues including patent disclosures and standard setting organizations, patent trolls, and whether patents help startups grow and succeed.
    Page 1 of 22 Results →
    • 16 Mar 2023
    • Research & Ideas

    Why Business Travel Still Matters in a Zoom World

    by Kara Baskin

    Meeting in person can make all the difference for colleagues from different time zones or cultural backgrounds. A study by Prithwiraj Choudhury traces flight patterns among 5,000 airports around the world to show how business travel propels innovation.

    • 22 Feb 2022
    • Research & Ideas

    Lack of Female Scientists Means Fewer Medical Treatments for Women

    by Kristen Senz

    Women scientists are more likely to develop treatments for women, but many of their ideas never become inventions, research by Rembrand Koning says. What would it take to make innovation more equitable? Open for comment; 0 Comments.

    • 13 Sep 2021
    • Research & Ideas

    Science: The Unlikely Frontier for New Business Ideas

    by Avery Forman

    Iterative R&D might get products to market quickly, but innovation grounded in scientific research tends to be more valuable, says research by Joshua Lev Krieger and colleagues. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

    • 07 Jun 2020
    • Working Paper Summaries

    Financial Distancing: How Venture Capital Follows the Economy Down and Curtails Innovation

    by Sabrina T. Howell, Josh Lerner, Ramana Nanda, and Richard Townsend

    Common wisdom holds that VC investment and VC-backed startups are relatively insulated from downturns. This study shows that the relative quantity and quality of innovation declines more for VC-backed firms than for other types of firms during downturns.

    • 06 Feb 2020
    • Research & Ideas

    What We Learned from Reading Jeff Bezos’ Patents

    by Tricia Gregg and Boris Groysberg

    By studying Jeff Bezos' personal patent records, Tricia Gregg and Boris Groysberg offer a unique glimpse into Amazon's strategy. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

    • 28 Dec 2019
    • Working Paper Summaries

    Tech Clusters

    by William R. Kerr and Frederic Robert-Nicoud

    We are witnessing a major transformation of business to achieve strategic positions in powerful tech hubs, but most workers and consumers will always be far away. The authors describe the spatial concentration of tech activity in the United States and explore the economics of tech clusters with an eye to the future of innovation and economic geography.

    • 24 Sep 2019
    • Research & Ideas

    Do National Security Secrets Hold Back National Innovation?

    by Kristen Senz

    It's a paradox about innovation. Inventors want to keep secret the inner workings of their most commercial technologies, while technological progress relies on transparency. Daniel Gross looks to the secrets of WW II for insights. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

    • 19 Jun 2019
    • Working Paper Summaries

    Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations

    by Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury, and Hillel Rapoport

    This study provides robust econometric evidence for how immigrant inventors shape the innovation dynamics of their receiving countries. Countries receiving inventors from other nations that specialize in patenting particular technologies are more likely to have a significant increase in patent applications of the same technology.

    • 13 Mar 2019
    • Working Paper Summaries

    The Consequences of Invention Secrecy: Evidence from the USPTO Patent Secrecy Program in World War II

    by Daniel P. Gross

    Information plays a critical role in technological progress, yet many inventors opt for trade secrecy to protect their intellectual property. This paper studies the myriad repercussions of concealing new inventions through the lens of a systematic and sweeping invention secrecy policy implemented by the USPTO during World War II.

    • 04 Sep 2018
    • Working Paper Summaries

    Some Facts of High-Tech Patenting

    by Michael Webb, Nick Short, Nicholas Bloom, and Josh Lerner

    This study details the growth of patenting in software, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and related technologies in the twenty-first century, and the continuing dominance of inventors in large US, Japanese, and Korean companies. Researchers still need to understand the impact of such trends on social welfare more generally.

    • 11 Jun 2018
    • Research & Ideas

    Why South Korea's Samsung Built the Only Outdoor Skating Rink in Texas

    by Michael Blanding

    New research by Lauren Cohen and Umit Gurun finds that when some companies are sued, they put their advertising dollars to work in unusual ways to influence local juries. Meet 'TiVo,' the championship steer. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

    • 11 Dec 2017
    • Working Paper Summaries

    The Use and Misuse of Patent Data: Issues for Corporate Finance and Beyond

    by Josh Lerner and Amit Seru

    Corporate finance researchers who analyze patent data are at risk of making highly predictable errors. The problem arises from dramatic changes in the direction and location of technological innovation (and patenting practice) over recent decades. This paper explains the pitfalls and suggests practical steps for avoiding them.

    • 28 Feb 2017
    • Working Paper Summaries

    Patent Trolls and Small-Business Employment

    by Ian Appel, Joan Farre-Mensa, and Elena Simintzi

    Patent trolls are organizations that own patents but do not make or use the patented technology directly, instead using their patent portfolios to target firms with patent-infringement claims. This paper provides evidence that state anti-troll laws have had a net positive effect for small firms in high-tech industries. There is no significant effect for larger or non-high-tech firms.

    • 17 Jan 2017
    • Working Paper Summaries

    Foreign Competition and Domestic Innovation: Evidence from US Patents

    by David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, Pian Shu and Gary Pisano

    US firms in industries exposed to greater change in import competition from China have suffered worse growth in patenting and R&D spending than firms in industries exposed to less change in Chinese competition.

    • 28 Nov 2016
    • Research & Ideas

    Challenging the Belief that Liability Laws Kill Medical Device Innovation

    by Michael Blanding

    Many policymakers believe liability laws need reforming so that medical device makers are free to innovate without threat of costly lawsuits. But new research by Hong Luo and Alberto Galasso suggests innovation is not thwarted—just rechanneled. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

    • 18 Nov 2016
    • Working Paper Summaries

    Innovation Network

    by Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, and William Kerr

    Despite recent advances that measure how the technological development processes in innovative fields link with each other, our understanding of how progress in one technological area links to prior advances in upstream technological fields has been limited. The authors’ analysis and mapping of 1.8 million U.S. patents and their citation properties shows that a stable innovation network acts as a conduit for a cumulative process of technological and scientific progress. Upstream technological developments play an important role in the future pace and direction of patenting in downstream fields. This finding implies that if R&D slackens in one period the effects will still be felt years later in downstream fields.

    • 01 Nov 2016
    • Working Paper Summaries

    Patent Disclosures and Standard-Setting

    by Josh Lerner, Haris Tabakovic, and Jean Tirole

    Technological standards are a central component of the modern network economy. Standard setting organizations (SSOs) play a variety of roles. One of the most important is ensuring the disclosure of relevant intellectual property—in particular, potentially essential patents—prior to the key decisions about a proposed standard. This study finds that large downstream firms are more likely to make generic disclosures to SSOs. Higher quality patents are more likely to be disclosed via specific disclosures.

    • 26 Sep 2016
    • Working Paper Summaries

    Technological Leadership (de)Concentration: Causes in ICTE

    by Yasin Ozcan and Shane Greenstein

    The market structure for the Information and Communications Technology equipment industry has undergone enormous changes in the last four decades. This paper characterizes long-term trends by analyzing the concentration in patents from 1976 to 2010 and comparing measured changes against popular assumptions about the size and scale of changes in innovation.

    • 19 May 2016
    • Research Event

    Crowdsourcing, Patent Trolls, and Other Research Insights Highlighted at Harvard Business School Symposium

    by Dina Gerdeman & Carmen Nobel

    The 2016 Faculty Research Symposium looked at current and potential collaborations between HBS and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

    • 22 Jan 2016
    • Working Paper Summaries

    Financial Patent Quality: Finance Patents After State Street

    by Josh Lerner, Ann Leamon, Mark Baker & Andrew Speen

    Although the past few decades have seen a surge in patents of inventions related to financial services, concerns have been raised about the quality of those patents. New research shows that finance patents in aggregate cite fewer non-patent publications and especially fewer academic publications.

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