Bruno van Pottelsberghe

Université Libre de Bruxelles | ULB · Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management

This paper revisits the literature providing empirical evidence that patent offices are biased in favor of their national applicants. If true, this “national bias” would be proof of disrespect of the national treatment principle, deeply rooted in several international patent treaties. Existing investigations are, however, subject to an important li...

This paper puts forward a new methodology to characterize and compare the examination practice of patent offices. The methodology codifies public information into a typology of chronological key examiner actions. This approach translates into a quantitative characterization of search completeness (i.e. classification and citation practices), certai...

Recent developments in patenting activity are the subject of a growing literature. Existing research contributes to a better understanding of the incentives that drive economic agents to rely on the patent system (e.g. Cohen et al., 2000; Arundel, 2001; Blind et al., 2006; Peeters and van Pottelsberghe, 2006; von Graevenitz et al., 2013) and on pot...

This paper empirically investigates whether corporate governance practices implemented to align shareholders’ and managers’ interests affect the resources firms devote to R&D. Two databases – one on governance ratings and one on R&D investment – are merged to obtain a multi-country, multi-sector sample of 177 European companies involved in R&D acti...

This paper analyzes firms’ choices regarding the geographic scope of patent protection within the European patent system. We develop an econometric model at the patent level to quantify the impact of office fees and translation costs on firms’ decision to validate a patent in a particular country once it has been granted by the EPO. These costs hav...

This paper decomposes the R&D-patent relationship at the industry level to shed light on the sources of the worldwide surge in patent applications. The empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset that includes 5 patent indicators computed for 18 industries in 19 countries covering the period from 1987 to 2005. The analysis shows that variations...

This article decomposes the R&D–patent relationship at the industry level to shed light on the sources of the worldwide surge in patent applications. The empirical analysis is based on a unique data set that includes five patent indicators computed for 18 industries in 19 countries covering the period from 1987 to 2005. The analysis shows that vari...

Despite the growing interest in university-to-industry technology transfer, there are very few studies on the governance of universities’ technology transfer offices (TTOs). The few existing ones tend to focus on US universities and generally tackle one dimension of the governance. The present paper aims at contributing to this literature in two wa...

This paper describes a new patent-based indicator of inventive activity. The indicator is based on counting all the priority patent applications filed by a country’s inventors, regardless of the patent office in which the application is filed, and can therefore be considered as a complete ‘matrix’ of all patent counts. The method has the advantage...

This paper provides an update of the paper 'From R&D to Productivity Growth: Do the Institutional Settings and the Source of Funds of R&D Matter?' (Guellec and van Pottelsberghe 2004). We present estimates of the long-term impact of various sources of knowledge (R&D performed by the business sector, the public sector (higher education and governmen...

This paper puts forward a sustainable fee structure for the EU Patent (COMPAT). The proposal includes pre-grant and post-grant fees and illustrates the differences between Euro-direct applications and PCT applications. The break-even analysis shows that the COMPAT would make the European patent system more attractive with significantly lower relati...

This paper first describes the so-called patent backlogs and assesses the extent to which they might affect the examination process in major patent offices. Second it puts forward that the root causes of these backlogs in Europe and in the US are different. The backlog at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is three times larger t...

This paper presents a quality index for patent systems. The index is composed of nine operational design components that help shape the transparency of patent systems and affect the extent to which they comply with patentability conditions. Seven factors are related to rules and regulations (e.g., grace period, opposition process and continuation-i...

This paper provides an analysis of the impact of patent fees on the demand for patents. It presents a dataset of fees since 1980 at the European (EPO), the US and the Japanese patent offices. Descriptive statistics show that fees have severely decreased at the EPO over the 1990s, converging towards the level of fees in the US and Japan. The estimat...

The phenomenon of entrepreneurial universities has received considerable attention over the last decades. An entrepreneurial orientation by academia might put regions and nations in an advantageous position in emerging knowledge-intensive fields of economic activity. At the same time, such entrepreneurial orientation requires reconciliation with th...

This paper presents a critical survey of the literature on the determinants of patent value. The contributions to the literature are essentially two-fold. First, significant inconsistencies across existing studies are underlined. Second, a sensitivity analysis shows strong dependencies of several 'classical' results on two main empirical dimensions...

The present paper discusses the role of quality in patent systems from the perspective of patent offices' behavior and organization. After documenting original stylized facts, the paper presents a model in which patent offices set patent fees and the quality level of their examination processes. Various objectives of patent offices' governors are c...

After nearly 48 years of failure to create the EU patent, language issues and the design of a centralised patent-litigation court still dominate headlines. But behind these issues there are high financial stakes and control power to play for. The recent EU Council deal on an 'enhanced' European patent system does not solve the above problems, and h...

This working paper empirically investigates if corporate governance practices affect the resources firms devote to R&D. The authors Florence Honoré, Federico Munari and Bruno van Pottelsberghe found that an executive remuneration system that is linked to the firm's financial performance has a particularly strong negative impact on R&D. This confir...

This research note evaluates the extent to which national industrial structure affects country rankings based on aggregate R&D intensity. The econometric analysis performed on a cross-country cross-industry panel dataset (21 industrial sectors, 18 countries, and 5 years) suggests that accounting for industrial structure substantially affects the tr...

The continent's patent system is Byzantine, but current proposals for a new EU-wide patent could make matters worse, warns Bruno van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie.

In this Policy Brief, Bruegel Senior Fellow Bruno van Pottelsberghe makes the argument in favour of a single EU patent system. The author explains that the absence of a one-stop-shop for EU-wide patents hampers innovation and will pose serious challenges to small and medium-sized companies in the face of global competition. This paper analyses how...

Senior Resident Fellows Reinhilde Veugelers and Bruno van Pottelsberghe provide recommendations for the term of new Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes in this supplement to Bruegel's Memos to the New Commission: Europe's Economic Priorities 2010-2015. They argue that Kroes should move past a focus on infrastructure and concentrate more on ICT...

Innovation is key to the future of Europe. This Policy Contribution, written together by Mathias Dewatripont, Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management; Bruno van Pottelsberghe and Andre Sapir, Senior Fellows at Bruegel and professors at ULB; and Reinhilde Veugelers, senior fellow at Bruegel and professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,...

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

This paper reviews the economic literature on the role of fees in patent systems. Two main research questions are usually addressed: the impact of patent fees on the behavior of applicants and the question of optimal fees. Studies in the former group confirm that a range of fees affect the behavior of applicants and suggest that a patent is an inel...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

This paper reviews the economic literature on the role of fees in patent systems. Two main research questions are usually addressed: the impact of patent fees on the behavior of applicants and the question of optimal fees. Studies in the former group confirm that a range of fees affect the behavior of applicants and suggest that a patent is an inel...

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

This paper develops a methodology to compare the quality of examination services across patent offices. Quality is defined as the extent to which patent offices comply with their patentability conditions in a transparent way. The methodology consists of a two-layer analytical framework encompassing "legal standards" and their "operational design",...

The size of patent applications has doubled over the past two decades, resulting in a dramatic surge in the workload of patent offices all over the world and serious concerns over patent quality standards. The current paper investigates the sources of this inflation in claims and pages for EPO applications. Four hypotheses are quantitatively examin...

Contrary to an accepted wisdom, this paper shows that cross-country variations in the number of patents per researcher do not only reflect differences in the propensity to patent but also signals differences in research productivity. We put forward and test an empirical model that formally accounts for the productivity and the propensity component...

This article suggests that the consequences of the ‘fragmentation’ of the European patent system are more dramatic than the mere prohibitive costs of maintaining a patent in force in many jurisdictions. The prevalence of national jurisdictions, which are highly heterogeneous in their costs and practices, over the validity and enforcement of Europea...

These Memos, addressed to the next Commission President and to the new European commissioners, are written by Bruegel Scholars and edited by Senior Research Fellow André Sapir and focus on key economic aspects of EU policy-making. The new Commission will enter office at a challenging time for Europe, the EU and the Commission itself. The crisis ha...

In his blueprint, Bruno van Pottelsberghe first looks at the performance of patent arrangements in Europe, especially their cost effectiveness and the consistency of rules and remedies across countries. He then looks at current attempts at global patent cooperation to see if they will help or hinder the emergence of innovation worldwide and in Euro...

One feature of the European patent system that is heavily criticized nowadays is related to its fragmentation and the induced cost burden for applicants. Once a patent is granted by the EPO, the assignee must validate (and often translate) it and pay the renewal fees to keep it in force in each country in which protection is sought. The objective o...

In this new Bruegel policy brief, Jean Pisani-Ferry and Bruno van Pottelsberghe show that although the crisis originated in the US, Europe’s outlook has deteriorated faster and more sharply leading to the worst crisis observed during the post-war era. However, the length of the crisis matters at least as much at its depth, and policymakers should n...

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

This article presents 10 broad policy recommendations aiming at improving the awareness and a sound use of the patent system in Belgium. This exercise was motivated by the relatively low reliance on the patent system in Belgium, by both applicants and inventors. The main objective was not to stimulate ‘blindly’ the filing of more patents applicatio...

The ‘entrepreneurial university’ is an increasingly frequent notion in debates about new ways of knowledge production and the changing relationships between university, industry and government. A rich literature has developed exploring outputs of such activity, most notably ‘patenting’, ‘licensing’, and ‘spin-outs’. There is also a literature explo...

Patent-based indicators at the country level are frequently used to assess countries’ innovation performances or efforts. Yet they are often said to reflect the propensity to patent rather than actual research productivity. The authors of this article argue that patent-based indicators can rightfully be used to measure research productivity, as wit...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look at the sharp increase in academic patenting over the past 20 years and to raise important issues regarding the generation and diffusion of academic knowledge. Three key questions may be raised in this respect: What is behind the surge in academic patenting? Does patenting affect the quality and quantit...

Patent filings worldwide have been subject to a combined growth in terms of the number of applications filed and their size. This is putting patent systems under tremendous pressure, as witnessed by the evolution of backlogs at several patent offices. The present article presents an analysis of the evolution in patent voluminosity observed at the E...

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the extent to which technological specialization influences the observed R&D intensity of countries, and hence would bias the well-known country rankings that consist in comparing aggregate R&D intensity. The econometric analysis performed on a cross-country cross-industry panel dataset (21 industrial sect...

Europe is not delivering on its commitment under the Lisbon agenda to increase its R&D-to-GDP ratio to 3% by 2010. But does the European Commission's practice of benchmarking each and every member state against the headline 3% figure make sense? R&D intensity is influenced by industrial specialisation, but also by other factors such as a large inte...

This paper analyses the consequences for the European patent system of the recently ratified London Agreement, which aims to reduce the translation requirements for patent validation procedures in 15 out of 34 national patent offices. The simulations suggest that the cost of patenting has been reduced by 20–30% since the enforcement of the LA. With...

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

Using an original survey sample of 103 unquoted Belgian technology-based small firms (TBSFs), we examine the capital structure of start-up companies during their consecutive development stages. We find that internal funds, either alone as personal savings or in combination with family and friends, to be the primary source of financing. Personal fun...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

Research and development at the nanoscale requires a large degree of integration, from convergence of research disciplines in new fields of enquiry to new linkages between start-ups, regional actors and research facilities. Based on the analysis of two clusters in nanotechnologies (MESA+ (Twente) and other centres in The Netherlands and Minatec in...

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

This paper reviews the economic literature on the role of fees in patent systems. Two main research questions are usually addressed: the impact of patent fees on the behavior of applicants and the question of optimal fees. Studies in the former group confirm that a range of fees affect the behavior of applicants and suggest that a patent is an inel...

The EPO traditionally grants at least 60% of all patent applications, the rest being either withdrawn (30-35%) or refused (5%). This paper provides quantitative evidence suggesting that up to 54% of all patent withdrawals could be considered as induced by the work of EPO examiners, and hence may be taken as a more appropriate indicator of the rigou...

The renewal of patents and their geographical scope for protection constitute two essential dimensions in a patent’s life, and probably the most frequently used patent value indicators. The intertwining of these dimensions (the geographical scope of protection may vary over time) makes their analysis complex, as any measure along one dimension requ...

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

In the information technology (IT) industry, which confronted a major transition phase during the 1990s, partnerships became a strategic component of the new ‘divided technical leadership’ that emerged from the industry's vertical disintegration. This paper attempts to evaluate the impact of 1676 partnerships on the financial performance (revenue a...

This paper puts forward new potential determinants of patent value which are related to the identification of institutional sources of knowledge and the geographic scope of patenting strategy. The impact of these new indicators is evaluated through an empirical analysis that aims to explain the number of forward citations received by 208 patent fam...

Why does society allow, or even encourage, private appropriation of inventions? When do patents encourage competition, when do they hamper it? How should society design the compromise between the interest of the inventor and the interest of the users of patented inventions? How should the patent system adapt to new technological areas? These questi...

As the role of patents has become central in the knowledge economy, there is evidence that the current institutional and legal setting is unable to cope with the corresponding challenges. This difficulty is illustrated by the explosion of patent numbers and voluminosity, by recent controversies around genes and software, and by the inability of Eur...

This chapter describes the various routes that can be chosen to obtain patent protection in some or all of the European countries. The EPO offers a centralized granting process, which includes various stages from the search for prior art, to the substantive examination and the final decision to grant the application. A typology of four broad filing...

This chapter explores several challenges facing the patent system: university patenting, the cost of patents, and the growing number and voluminosity of patent filings. The pros and cons of academic patenting are investigated through its potential impact on the quality and quantity of scientific research. A methodology for the evaluation of patent...

The patent system has been faced for more than ten years with an avalanche of patent filings, which puts into question its ability to fulfil its social mission of encouraging innovation and the diffusion of technology. This situation is due to the emergence of new technologies, the adoption of new and more aggressive IP strategies by the business s...

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips stock price has been predicted using the difference between core and headline CPI in the United States. Linear trends in the CPI difference allow accurate prediction of the prices at a five to ten-year horizon.

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

This paper empirically assesses potential determinants of firms' patenting behaviour in terms of both probability to have a patent portfolio and size of this patent portfolio. It focuses more particularly on the role played by different types of innovation strategies pursued by firms. Undertaking R&D activities and basic and applied research especi...

One feature of the European patent system that is heavily criticized nowadays is related to its fragmentation and the induced cost burden for applicants. Once a patent is granted by the EPO, the assignee must validate (and often translate) it and pay the renewal fees to keep it in force in each country in which protection is sought. The objective o...

This paper compares corporate and academic patents and tests whether they have similar value distributions and share common determinants of value. The empirical results based on an in-depth analysis of 400 biotech patents applied for by Belgian universities and firms lead to the following observations: (i) academic and corporate patent value distri...

The objective of this paper is to assess whether and to what extent the cost of patenting affects the demand for patents. The empirical analysis, which focuses on the patent systems of the USA, Japan, and Europe during the year 2003, leads to the following methodological and empirical observations: i) after the grant, the translation, validation an...

This paper reviews the economic literature on the role of fees in patent systems. Two main research questions are usually addressed: the impact of patent fees on the behavior of applicants and the question of optimal fees. Studies in the former group confirm that a range of fees affect the behavior of applicants and suggest that a patent is an inel...

This paper analyses several issues that arise when measuring technological specialisation with patent data. Three starting choices are required regarding the data source, the statistical measure and the sectoral aggregation level. We show that the measure is highly sensitive to the data source and to the level of sectoral aggregation. The statistic...

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

This paper analyzes antecedents of patent activity of 87 European universities. The findings reveal that more patent activity is observed within larger universities and at universities that encompass engineering and biomedical departments. Higher levels of scientific productivity and contract research coincide with higher levels of patent activity....

In the last decades, with the rise of innovation as the engine of growth for firms, sectors and nations, patents have gained a central place in business and policy debates. The primary objective of a patent is to provide a legally enforceable protection against imitation to any invention that can demonstrate a sufficient innovative step and that sa...

Venture capital (VC) is a financial intermediary that aims at meeting innovative start-ups’ needs. These firms are generally associated with large growth potentials and high levels of uncertainty. A growing number of scholars have documented the positive impact that venture funds have on the probability of success of start-ups, as well as on the gr...

The role of intellectual property (IP), and more precisely the role of patents, is increasingly considered as a major issue for managers and policy-makers. At the firm level, patents are used as a legal protection means for innovative products and processes, and as a strategic tool in technological negotiations. At the country level, the patent sys...

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips stock price has been predicted using the difference between core and headline CPI in the United States. Linear trends in the CPI difference allow accurate prediction of the prices at a five to ten-year horizon.

This paper puts forward new potential determinants of patent value which are mainly related to the identification of institutional sources of knowledge and the geographic scope of patenting strategy. The impact of these new indicators is evaluated through an empirical analysis that focuses on the number of forward citations received by 208 patent f...

Specific innovation capabilities enable large firms to depart from constant returns to scale and benefit from significant economies of scale. These capabilities improve the quality of the labor force organization and therefore positively impact labor productivity.

This paper provides evidence showing that collaborative agreements in the IT industry contribute to decrease the R&D intensity of the largest firms. This is particularly true for acquisitions (as opposed to alliances, consortia and joint ventures) and for the mixed agreements (i.e. with a sales, marketing and technological content).

This paper presents three new patent-based indicators of internationalisation of knowledge generation. They measure the extent of international cooperation in research and the international location of research facilities associated with multinational firms — i.e., cross-border ownership. These indicators are based on triadic patent data (patent fa...

This paper aims at contributing to the literature on the impact of a company on its country? economy. It first puts forward an analysis of the ICT sector worldwide and the imp