Nicolas van Zeebroeck

• PhD in Economics and Management, Université libre de Bruxelles
• Professor at ULB - Solvay Business School

A unique feature of digital technologies is their broad impact at both business and market dynamics levels. While the first impact is often studied by scholars under the lens of digital transformation (DT), the second is often separately addressed by the analysis of strategic renewal to adapt to the new environment. Here, we assess the interaction...

We investigate firm decisions to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) technology and how adoption is sourced: by purchasing commercial readymade software, by developing or customizing solutions in‐house, or both. Using a cross‐sectional data set of 3143 firms from across Europe, we examine the extent to which sourcing strategies exhibit complementari...

A large focus of digital transformation has been on embedding digitization across organizational functions, but the most successful transformations are often coupled with strategic renewal. A deeper look at successful digital transformations shows that strategic renewal is facilitated by pervasive digital technology adoption, as those technologies...

As digital technologies emerge and improve rapidly, firms face changing tradeoffs in terms of their technology infrastructure and strategic direction. Hence, many of them adopt new digital technology and develop new business models and strategies. The literature on strategic alignment of IT suggests that firms need to synchronize these different do...

How organizations can adapt to a constantly changing business environment by being flexible but focused, embracing change, and moving fast. In the new digital world, the unknowns are never-ending. Our ability to embrace the demands of change has become a prerequisite for success. It's not easy. We don't work the way we did last year. Next year, it...

Under what conditions does digital technology adoption increase cross location knowledge flows within firms? We investigate this question by studying the impact of adopting basic Internet access on cross-location knowledge flows within the same firm. We construct a large data set of Internet adoption and patent citations among dyadic pairs of firm-...

Integrating knowledge across a firm's value chain (e.g. between R&D, marketing and manufacturing functions), which we denote “Knowledge Integration” (KI), has been consistently found to be a strong predictor of product innovation performance in the management literature. Such cross-functional integration does not occur by chance, but by design, as...

We compare patent litigation cases across four European jurisdictions—Germany, the UK (England and Wales), France, The Netherlands—using case-level data gathered from cases filed in the four jurisdictions during the period 2000–2008. Overall, we find substantial differences across jurisdictions in terms of caseloads—notably, courts in Germany hear...

Patent disputes are important events for patentees, their competitors, and society. Using a unique dataset of patent disputes in Europe, we estimate their likelihood and outcome based on the choices and actions of parties during patent prosecution. We build our hypotheses using classical models of litigation and settlement, namely, divergent expect...

What is the capacity of ICT to reduce the (geographical and technological) localization of knowledge? In this paper, we analyze the impact of Internet adoption within US firms on knowledge spillovers. More specifically, we investigate the impact of basic Internet access on the likelihood that patents invented at a given R&D establishment cite paten...

This paper provides an agent-based software exploration of the wellknown free market efficiency/equality trade-off. Our study simulates the interaction of agents producing, trading and consuming goods in the presence of different market structures, and looks at how efficient the producers/consumers mapping turn out to be as well as the resulting di...

Knowledge integration, which facilitates interactions between R&D and other functions within a firm value chain, and patenting are both reckoned to increase the returns to R&D and firm performance. However, the combined effect of a joint use is in many ways ambiguous since those strategies pursue different objectives in terms of managing the flow o...

We compare patent litigation cases across four European jurisdictions—Germany, the UK (England and Wales), France, The Netherlands—using case-level data gathered from cases filed in the four jurisdictions during the period 2000–2008. Overall, we find substantial differences across jurisdictions in terms of caseloads—notably, courts in Germany hear...

How did the diffusion of the Internet influence research collaborations within firms? We examine the relationship between business use of basic Internet technology and the size and geographic composition of industrial research teams between 1992 and 1998. We find robust empirical evidence that basic Internet adoption is associated with an increased...

Due to its fragmentation and the difficulty of collecting data, European patent litigation has rarely been investigated across the various nations in which it occurs. This paper overcomes this vacuum, analyzing a never-before available dataset on patent actions in seven European countries during 2000-2010. We observe striking differences in the lik...

Is a competitive free market the most efficient way to maximize welfare and to equally allocate rare resources among economic agents? Economists usually tend to think this is the case. This paper presents a preliminary attempt through an object-oriented multi-agent model to address this question. Agents which are alternatively producers, sellers, b...

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...

This work addresses graph-based semi-supervised classification and between-ness computation in large, sparse, networks (several millions of nodes). The objective of semi-supervised classification is to assign a label to unlabeled nodes using the whole topology of the graph and the labeling at our disposal. Two approaches are developed to avoid expl...

This paper studies how IT investments shape the geography of firm innovation. We focus on the role of investments by US firms in basic internet technology on the organization of innovation. We combine establishment-level IT investment data with data on US patenting activity at the MSA level. Our difference-in-difference econometric estimation app.r...

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...

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 proposes an analysis of the evolution and determinants of patent filing strategies and their impact on the patent system. Its motivation resides in the evolution of practices (patent drafting and filing) over the past 20 years, characterized by a surge in the number and size of patent applications. These developments could compromise t...

Relying on a comprehensive dataset including detailed information on all patent applications filed to the European Patent Office from 1980 to 2000 and on the renewal of those of them that were granted, this paper presents a survival time analysis of the determinants of patent length in Europe. First of all, they reveal that the increase in the leng...

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...

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 paper reviews and analyses several issues in the measurement and interpretation of patent value indicators over a large database. Each of the five most classical indicators proposed in the literature (family sizes, renewals, grant decision outcomes, forward citations, and oppositions) witnesses the well-known properties of patent value: a seve...

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...

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 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...