Intellectual Property and Patents

Patents are legal instruments that grant inventors temporary exclusive rights in exchange for public disclosure of their innovations, and researchers study how these rights shape the pace and direction of technological change across industries and borders. A central concern is understanding how patent quality, citation patterns, and licensing arrangements affect both a firm's market value and the broader diffusion of knowledge through the economy — since a patent that blocks follow-on research carries very different consequences than one that catalyzes further invention. Scholars are actively debating how to measure the economic value of individual patents, how global differences in protection regimes influence where and how firms invest in R&D, and whether strong intellectual property rights ultimately accelerate or slow the spillovers of knowledge that fuel long-run innovation.

Works

96,693

Total citations

463,493

Keywords

Patent AnalysisIntellectual Property RightsInnovationTechnology RoadmappingPatent CitationsMarket Value