Innovation and Patenting within Containerized Liner Shipping

Increasingly, in many industries, companies commercialize their technology and innovations through patenting to gain an edge over competition. Within the maritime sector, while literature on innovation is expanding, issues related to the importance of intangible assets, such as patenting, for the participant firms of the industry remain unaddressed. Utilizing innovational frameworks and patent data withdrawn from European Patent Organization’s (EPO’s) database, the aim of this paper is to investigate the innovative level, in terms of patents granted, of incumbent market actors in liner shipping. Apart from patent counts, this exercise sheds light on the areas to which these patents apply, providing a classification while also investigating additional attributes which relate to patent citations, investors and applicants. Although results indicate a varying degree of utilization of the patenting system amongst liner carriers, they nonetheless affirm to some extent that knowledge creation is a valuable tool in the arsenal of some liner carriers, and that patenting is one of the various means utilized to enhance their market position and achieve a sustained competitive advantage. In addition, findings suggest that liner carriers’ innovative efforts have, based on the forward citations received, some significance, while they focus primarily the development of patented technologies which enhance the operational efficiency of their vessels. In this respect, the investigation undertaken sheds some light and provides a novel perspective on understanding the behaviour and innovative propensity of liner shipping companies.

Heterogeneous Innovation over the Business Cycle

Schumpeter (1939) claims that recessions are periods of “creative destruction,” concentrating innovation that is useful for the long-term growth of the economy. However previous research finds that standard measures of firms’ innovation, such as R&D expenditures or raw patent counts, concentrate in booms. We argue that these measures do not capture shifts in firms’ innovative search strategies. We contemplate firms’ choice between exploration vs. exploitation over the business cycle and find evidence with more nuanced measures of patent characteristics that firms shift towards exploration during contractions and exploitation during expansions, with a stronger effect for firms in more cyclical industries.

Does income redistribution impede innovation?

Economic inequalities have been increasing in many countries since the 1980s provoking calls for more income redistribution. One argument against increased redistribution is that it could hamper innovation and technological progress. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that empirically investigates the relationship between government redistributive policies at the top of income distribution and innovative activity in a panel of countries. We use new,high-quality and cross-country comparable panel data on income redistribution from distributional national accounts. The sample covers 34 advanced and emerging countries over 1980-2010. We do not find any negative impact of the redistributive effect on innovation in the crosscountry setting. This result is robust to the use of various measures of income redistribution and patent-based indicators of innovation (patent counts, patent citations and patent originality).

STATE OWNERSHIP AND INNOVATION: THE RELATIVE MERITS OF LOCAL AND CENTRAL STATE JUDGED BY INNOVATION PERFORMANCE

This paper compares the innovation performance of state-owned firms owned by different levels of government, with that of privately owned firms. Analysis of a 116-firm panel dataset for the Chinese solar photovoltaic industry from 1999 to 2015 suggests that government’s financial support increases the quantity of innovation outputs. However, the efficiency in utilising the financial resources is determined by the effectiveness of agency relationships. Applying agency theory to the Chinese politico-economic context indicates that innovation quality depends on length and complexity of agency chains, engagement of monitors, and the tenure of managers. By using forward citations and proportion of patents in active use, two measures of innovation quality that are more valid and reliable than patent counts, our study finds that municipally owned firms are superior in terms of innovation productivity to those under central ownership, and comparable to private firms.

Mapping Patent Usage in Management Research: The State of Prior Art

Patents play an important, and increasingly influential, role in management scholarship. In this study, we conduct a broad and systematic review of patent-based empirical work in the management field, which involves mapping the ways in which scholars are using patent-based measures to represent concepts and assessing this usage based on measurement principles. With respect to mapping, our review identifies the different types of measures that researchers have constructed based on different types of patent data (e.g., patent counts, backward citations) as well as delineates the classes of theoretical concepts that are being represented by those measures. In terms of assessing, as a complement to prior surveys of patent-based research that have assessed patents as indicators based on features of patents, patenting, and patent offices, we develop a framework that is based on measurement principles. Using this framework, our assessment of patent-based research in management reveals important patterns surrounding foundational measurement issues, i.e., method bias, validation threats, model misspecification. Our review makes two core contributions: one centering on summarizing how patents have been used in management research and one focusing on guiding management scholars in terms of common measurement issues for patent-based indicators. These contributions have important implications for future scholarly work in management.

Especialización vs diversificación del conocimiento tecnológico universitario en las regiones europeas

This paper explores the relationship between regional patterns of university technological diversification/specialization in Europe and its effects on the production of new university technological outcomes as measured by patent counts. Our dataset contains 4,580 university-owned patents related to 202 regions of European Union-15 for the period from 1998 to 2004. Several econometric specifications reveal that a diversification strategy in the production of university technological knowledge favours the generation of subsequent new university patents. Specialization has a positive and significant effect in high-technology sectors.

Search for the Developing Trends by Patent Analysis: A Case Study of Lithium-Ion Battery Electrolytes

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are now used in electric vehicles (EVs), and the electrolyte is one of the major components governing the performance of LIBs. The patent count-based method or patent indicator was used to understand the development status of the specific technology field. However, these approaches cannot provide a complete picture to realize the technology development. Therefore, the goal of this work is to develop a holistic approach to identify technological development trends. The top six patent assignees are first selected by an issued patent counts analysis, including Ube, Mitsubishi Chem., Panasonic, Sony, LG Chem., and Samsung SDI. The “modified” Ernst indicators are applied to reflect different innovation strategies among these patent assignees. The forward-citation analysis and technology-function matrix show that using mixed lithium salts and organic solvents with novel additives compounds are the developing trends to improve the performance of LIBs. The multi-dimensional scaling shows technological similarities among these six companies. The developed approaches can be used to obtain a better overview for electrolyte technology and be also applicable to other technological fields.

Innovation Institution and Spatial Transfer of Energy Industry: The Case of Jiangsu Province, China

This study aims to explore the effect of innovation institution on spatial transfer of energy industry in Jiangsu, China. We focus on the disparity of innovation and energy industry, and analyze the spatial transfer difference in different types of energy industry, rather than view energy industry as a whole. The study demonstrates the spatial change of energy industry at regional level and maps the spatial pattern at city level. The study chooses intellectual property rights (IPRs) protection intensity, authorization patents and local research and development (R&D) investment as the proxy of innovation. Using official data and employing panel fixed-effect model at city-industry level, we conclude (a) innovation abilities significantly influence the spatial transfer of energy industry in Jiangsu. Especially, due to the different time, IPRs protection, patent counts, and R&D investment have different effects on different regions in Jiangsu; (b) 2010 is an important turning point for energy industry development in Jiangsu, and after 2010, the energy industry begins to shift to the middle and northern Jiangsu, whereas the spatial pattern of energy industry in coastal cities is basically unchanged; (c) there is a great difference between the regions in Jiangsu Province, and industrial upgrading has not been achieved in northern Jiangsu.