Early Disclosure of Invention and Reduced Duplication: An Empirical Test
Sonja Lück, Benjamin Balsmeier, Florian Seliger, Lee Fleming
Management Science · 2020 · Volume 66 · Issue 6
Abstract
Much work on innovation strategy assumes or theorizes that competition in innovation elicits duplication of research and that disclosure decreases such duplication. We validate this empirically using the American Inventors Protection Act (AIPA), three complementary identification strategies, and a new measure of blocked future patent applications. We show that AIPA—intended to reduce duplication, through default disclosure of patent applications 18 months after filing—reduced duplication in the U.S. and European patent systems. The blocking measure provides a clear and micro measure of technological competition that can be aggregated to facilitate the empirical investigation of innovation, firm strategy, and the positive and negative externalities of patenting. This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy.
Keywords
AIPA, duplicative research, knowledge disclosure, patents
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