Lab
Dietmar Harhoff's Lab
About the lab
The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition is committed to fundamental legal and economic research on processes of innovation and competition and their regulation. Our research focuses on the incentives, determinants and implications of innovation. With an outstanding international team of scholars and excellent scientific and administrative infrastructure including our renowned library, we host academics from all over the world and actively promote young researchers. We inform and guide legal and economic discourse on an impartial basis. As an independent research institution, we provide evidence-based research results to academia, policymakers, the private sector as well as the general public.
Featured research (2)
Despite decades of research, the relationship between the quality of science and the value of inventions has remained unclear. We present the result of a large-scale matching exercise between 4.8 million patent families and 43 million publication records. We find a strong positive relationship between the quality of the scientific contributions referenced in patents and the value of the respective inventions. We rank patents by the quality of the science to which they are linked. Strikingly, high-ranking patents are twice as valuable as low-ranking patents, which, in turn, are about as valuable as patents without a direct science link. We show this core result for various science quality and patent value measures. The effect of science quality on patent value remains relevant even when science is linked indirectly through other patents. Our findings imply that what is considered excellent within the science sector also leads to outstanding outcomes in the technological and commercial realms.
