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    • COVID-19 Business Impact Center
      COVID-19 Business Impact Center
      Cold Call
      A podcast featuring faculty discussing cases they've written and the lessons they impart.
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      • 19 Jan 2021
      • Cold Call Podcast

      Engaging Community to Create Proactive, Equitable Public Safety

      Saint Paul, Minnesota Mayor Melvin Carter swept into office in 2018 promising equity. He wanted a new public safety framework that would be rooted in community. Then, with the COVID-19 pandemic wiping out much of the city’s budget and the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by a police officer in neighboring Minneapolis sparking calls to defund the police, how would Mayor Carter make these changes happen? Professor Mitch Weiss discusses the challenges and rewards of “possibility government” in his case, "Community-First Public Safety."  Open for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

      Read the Transcript

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      PatentsRemove Patents →

      Page 1 of 19 Results
      • 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; Comment(s) posted.

      • 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; Comment(s) posted.

      • 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; Comment(s) posted.

      • 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; Comment(s) posted.

      • 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; Comment(s) posted.

      • 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.

      • 20 Jan 2016
      • Working Paper Summaries

      The Bright Side of Patents

      by Joan Farre-Mensa, Deepak Hegde & Alexander Ljungqvist

      We examine whether patents help startups grow and succeed using detailed micro data on all patent applications filed by startups at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office since 2001 and approved or rejected before 2014. We find that patent approvals help startups create jobs, grow their sales, innovate, and reward their investors.

      • 01 Aug 2011
      • Research & Ideas

      Immigrant Innovators: Job Stealers or Job Creators?

      by Carmen Nobel

      The H-1B visa program, which enables US employers to hire highly skilled foreign workers for three years, is "a lightning rod for a very heated debate," says Harvard Business School professor William Kerr. His latest research addresses the question of whether the program is good for innovation, and whether it impacts jobs for Americans. Key concepts include: An uptick in the number of H-1B visas given to Indian and Chinese engineers correlates with an increase in the number of US patents. The H-1B program seems to have no overall effect on the number of jobs held by American-born scientists and engineers, nor does it affect the number of patents from inventors who have Anglo-Saxon names. Closed for comment; 37 Comment(s) posted.

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