Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine, for a sample of ten corporations in three industries (i.e. automotive suppliers, semiconductors, and computer networks), the different strategies that firms undertake when acquiring patent-protected technologies. In particular, the authors analyze and compare two alternative channels for patent acquisition: markets for technology (MFT) and merger and acquisition (M&A) processes.

The authors implement two types of analyses, at both patent and firm level. First, the authors perform an econometric analysis to evaluate whether acquired patented technologies differ in their patent bibliographic characteristics with respect to patent-protected technologies that have been developed internally by the examined firms. The authors then investigate the presence of differences in the characteristics of transacted patents acquired in the MFT or by means of M&A activities. Second, the authors take a firm-level perspective and examine the technology acquisition strategies adopted by selected companies to identify the presence of common patterns, industry-driven specificities and firm peculiarities.

The authors find that acquired patented technologies are, on average, more complex, of higher technical merit and the corresponding patents show a higher legal robustness. Econometric results reveal the presence of differences between M&A and MFT patents: the latter seem to protect less complex, and thus easier to trade, inventions. The analysis of the patterns of patent acquisitions at the firm level shows the presence of different strategies for the external sourcing of patented technologies, based on whether acquired patents protect core or non-core technology areas of the analyzed firms. Such patterns are discussed in the light of the different streams of the literature on intellectual property (IP) management.

This paper makes use of a new and comprehensive data set of the US patent transactions that took place between 2002 and 2010. The authors added detailed data on the evolution of the corporate trees of analyzed firms. The paper contributes to the literature on technology acquisitions and MFT by examining the different channels for patented technology acquisitions. The issue represents an emerging area of interest in the field of IP management.

The positive correlation between students’ internship and employability is well documented. However, there is no consensus on its relationship with academic performance. Previous studies investigated the Bachelor level: in the UK, the so-called sandwich placement is positively correlated; in the US, the results are mixed. This study aims to expand the scientific literature and focuses on Politecnico di Torino, Italy: the cases of the Industrial and Management Engineering Bachelor (BA) and Master of Science (MS) degree programs are examined.

The academic performance of 2,279 BA students and 2,560 MS students graduated between 2016 and 2021 is examined. Ordinary least square models are employed to test the relationship between grades and internship, controlling for ex ante academic scores, gender, age and geographical origin.

The results show a small robust negative correlation between internship and grades, especially at the bachelor level, where potentially a self-selection occurs. At the master level, the negative relationship is significant but very small and might be partially determined by the marks of the exams substituting the internship.

This study contributes to the empirical research on the relationship between students’ grade and internship and suggests the presence of complementarities in several ways: the Italian context, characterized by an optional internship is examined, both at the BA and MS level. Universities that intend to organize internship as overlapping with lectures and exams should be cautious, especially when considering the BA level students, whose maturity and skills are less developed than MS ones.

Evidence from previous literature indicates that adopting a new innovative technology has a positive impact on a company’s business performance. Much less work has been carried out into examining whether a technology adoption has impact on corporate reputation. This paper aims to examine the latter topic in a context where social media is the channel used to share news about the introduction of a new technology. The empirical setting of the study consists of five retail companies located in the USA that decided to include Bitcoin as a payment platform.

Twitter data were used to measure how sharing news about the adoption of new technology could affect the reputation of the companies selected, keeping a clear distinction between the volume of data relating to social media responses and the sentiment expressed in the tweets. A panel vector autoregression model was used to incorporate series of data relating to news items, volume and sentiment.

The results show that the news about the adoption of a new technology has a positive impact on both the volume of tech-related tweets and the sentiment expressed in the tweets themselves, although the patterns of these two effects are different. The resulting impact decreases after a few days, both in volume and in sentiment.

The analysis has limitations that future research could address by extending and diversifying the examined companies and the social media used as data sources. The research suggests that managers in medium-sized companies can leverage on the introduction of new technologies that have a direct impact on their customers and gain reputational benefits in terms of immediate visibility.

The research introduces an additional dimension of analysis to the current stream of corporate reputation. Although the literature has already covered the dynamics of response to events on Twitter, by focusing on the adoption of the new Bitcoin technology, the paper provides novel insights.

This paper analyzes the importance given by venture capital (VC) firms to the different characteristics of the patent portfolio of a young innovative company (YIC). In an attempt to go beyond previous studies, the authors argue that not only is the size of a technological portfolio significant but also its nature. It is also examined whether the correlation between patents and VC financing varies across different industrial sectors and over different rounds of VC investments.

The empirical analysis has focused on a sample of 1,096 European YICs between the years 2010 and 2014. Target companies were identified in the monthly bulletins of Go4Venture, which reported the largest European deals and gathered information on the amount of VC financing. Additional data was derived from FinSMEs and crunchbase. Industrial sectors were differentiated according to their ability to appropriate the returns of innovation by relying on patent protection mechanisms. A multivariate regression framework at the patent family level was adopted to investigate empirical associations between the amount of VC financing and the characteristics of a YIC's patent portfolio.

The results confirm the positive value of patents. Both the size and the characteristics of a YIC patent portfolio have been found to be positively associated with the total amount of VC financing. Additionally, the correlation between a YIC patent portfolio and VC investment varies across industries and over rounds of funding. Although the number of patents is positively correlated with VC investments in sectors with strong Intellectual Property (IP) regimes, the same does not apply to sectors characterized by lower patent intensity, where qualitative metrics seem to have a stronger correlation. Significant differences have also been found for the different rounds of VC investments.

The limitations of this paper are related to data availability. Empirical associations have been investigated, but causal effects cannot be ascertained in this framework. The authors focused on a sample of firms that received VC funding. Several transactions were excluded, due to a lack of specifications pertaining to the round series. Furthermore, a number of potential drivers of the financed amounts, such as variables related to the founder or the management team, have not been considered in this study.

For firms operating in sectors with weak IP regimes, patents are positively associated with attracting equity capital, if they are the output of R&D collaborations and have higher technical merit. In industries where patent intensity is higher, patent portfolio size matters more than quality. This suggests that VC investors award innovation quality to cases in which patenting is less frequent. Since the results indicate that positive associations between patenting and VC financing are more significant in later stages, managers should plan their patenting strategy in advance to reap the related benefits, and then collect the premium at later VC stages.

In this paper, the importance given by VC firms to different characteristics of a YIC patent portfolio has been analyzed in terms of size, quality, and complexity. While previous empirical analyses mainly focused on a single sector, the authors have examined whether the relevance of patents for VC financing decisions varies across industries and over different rounds of investment. The geographical coverage of the sample is another novelty of the paper. Previous works focused on a limited number of countries, whereas this research has considered firms operating in several European countries.

In today’s economy, intangibles have become more important than physical assets for firm success. In particular, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) registered an increasing trend in patenting, exceeding large firms in the number of patent registrations. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the association between patents and SME sales performance, taking into consideration also patent quality.

The approach uses panel regression model to investigate the relationship between patenting and sales, controlling for firm size and firm age. The authors adopt a purposive sampling technique focusing on a sample of Italian SMEs in the mechanical industry.

The results show that the count of patents do not have any effect on sales performance, while the number of jurisdictions where the protection is extended produces a positive and significant result.

The main implication for SME entrepreneurs and managers is that relying on a large number of patents does not automatically lead to higher performance; instead, filing those patents which protect particularly valuable innovations could be more productive in terms of SME sales performance Moreover, the results suggest that a longer time lag between patent filing and SME sales performance might be possible.

This paper is one of first attempts to shed light on the issue regarding SMEs patent quality. It is notable that the quality of patents in terms of geographical scope is positively associated to SME sales performance.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to analyze to what extent innovation output of R & D collaborations, proxied by co-patenting activities in terms of quantity, characteristics and value, differs depending on whether the engaged R & D partners have a certain type of relationship (allies, suppliers and subsidiaries); to identify possible automakers co-patenting patterns taking into account the differences in the innovation output with their R & D partners.

To reach the aims, the authors matched two types of data: co-assigned patent portfolio of four automakers and relationship type between automakers and their co-assignees. Matching the company names of the two data sources allowed the authors to obtain the final data set used to carry out extensive descriptive and regression analysis, both on a firm- and patent-level.

Results show differences in the characteristics and the technological value of patented inventions in relation with the type of collaboration partner; they also support the authors in the identification of four co-patenting patterns (contingent, purposive, watchful and advanced) according to the co-patenting propensity and the presence of a preferred relationship type.

The paper contributes to the literature by investigating the presence of differences across the patenting activities of a selection of automakers and their supplier, allied and subsidiary firms. The issue related to patent value represents an emerging area of interest in the field of collaborations for innovation. The methodology constitutes a novelty by matching two different sources and standardizing the company names (“name game”) through an automated algorithm and a double manual check, by searching company web sites and corporate trees.

Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies, also known as three-dimensional printing (3DP), is a technological breakthrough that have the potential to disrupt the traditional operations of supply chains. They open the way to a supply chains innovation that can significantly benefit hospitals and health-related organizations in dealing with crises or unexpected events in a faster and more flexible way. In this study the authors identify the boundary of this potential support.

The authors adopt a case study approach to understand the dynamics behind a well-known best practice to identify the main opportunities and the main pitfalls that AM may pose to health-related organizations wanting to leverage them.

The case highlights that it is possible to increase hospital flexibility using AM and that by leveraging the Internet it is possible to spread the benefits faster than what it would be normally possible using traditional supply chain processes. At the same time the case highlights that leveraging these technologies needs buy-in from all the relevant stakeholders.

The paper is one of the first, to the best of the authors' knowledge, to highlight the main opportunities and difficulties of implementing 3DP technologies in hospital supply chain management.

The purpose of the paper is to advance a framework that can assess and analyze the value of patent portfolios. On this purpose, the framework develops a conceptual and comprehensive index, the patent portfolio value index (PPVI), to assess the patent innovation level and suggest economic-strategic guidelines.

The authors have designed and applied a framework that synthesizes into a single index the results of a multiple criteria approach, based on information derived from quantitative objective data (claims, citations, and market coverage), information related to qualitative determinants (strategic positioning and economic importance), and information derived from decision makers’ perceptions and judgments.

The authors have applied the PPVI to the 3,532 patent portfolio documents in an Italian worldwide player in aerospace and defense market. The combined analysis, provided by the PPVI and a qualitative synoptic representation, has made it possible to understand the strategic positioning and alignment of patents with the core business of the company. The results of the analysis have provided managers with the necessary suggestions regarding action items to be performed: to reinforce, license, try to dismiss, or sell some of the examined patents of the portfolios.

The PPVI supplies a quick procedure to ascertain the profitability of patents and accounts for the value of a patent portfolio from an internal business perspective.

As it is built and defined, the PPVI shows elements of novelty compared to the other indexes existing in the literature, in that it follows a multiple criteria approach by merging quantitative and qualitative information.

It is the responsibility of the national governments to deliver healthcare services that are both effective and affordable to everyone. There are still gaps in this supply, which is extremely demanding. In this sense, companies are attempting to reach neglected markets and disrupt the marketplace with novel solutions. Although there are still anecdotal examples, a thorough literature evaluation is lacking. This study aims to provide a synthesis of the future of healthcare start-ups.

Papers that included the term “healthcare start-ups,” “health-tech start-ups,” “start-up,” “Artificial intelligence in healthcare,” and “Health tech start-ups in India” were considered for the analysis. The Biblioshiny package under the R programming tool was considered for a detailed analysis of the papers.

A total of 854 documents were related to healthcare start-ups, from which only 14 papers are related to health-tech start-ups and four papers are related to artificial intelligence in healthcare start-ups. It has been found from the past works of literature that the effectiveness of technology for information and communication in healthcare has significantly increased in recent years. Technology has already begun to permeate the healthcare market from other fields and industries. One way that the internet will help the industry evolve is by integrating digital health into daily life.

The study is not using other databases but is limited to Google Scholar and Scopus. A significant constraint of this study is the paucity of relevant literature in reputable publications on health and information systems. Another restriction was that gray literature, such as any journal or newspaper written by members of the health community about health-tech start-ups, was not taken into account.

Healthcare players should exhibit a fundamental openness to novel solutions to facilitate the digitalization of the healthcare system. Developing technology is widely used, and from an innovation perspective, a start-up should focus on innovation by employing technology and offering revolutionary healthcare solutions.

The novelty of this research is based on its presentation of an organized and thorough literature evaluation, which defines the current state of the art concerning green start-ups. To create a sustainable start-up, a thorough study of the information gained in respect of its healthcare start-up is presented.