Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.
DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.
Description (through texts, images, models or samples) played a central role in the patent regimes that emerged in the eighteenth century, first in England, later in the United States and in France. Description ensured that the contract—protection in excha ...
This thesis investigates the economic effect of patents and the patent system through the lens of patent commercialisation. The thesis is composed of four chapters, where each chapter is an independent scientific paper. In the first chapter, we present a n ...
This paper assesses the extent to which the international migration of inventors affects innovation in the receiving country. Drawing on a novel database that maps the migratory patterns of inventors, we exploit the end of the Soviet Union and the conseque ...
Governments have strong incentives to allow their inventors to free ride on foreign technologies. They can achieve this result by discriminating against foreigners in the patent system-by refusing to grant foreigners a patent for their inventions. Internat ...
The United States patent system is unique in that it requires applicants to cite documents they know to be relevant to the examination of their patent applications. Lampe (2012) presents evidence that applicants strategically withhold 21-33% of relevant ci ...
Patents have traditionally been used in the history of technology as an indication of the thinking process of the inventors, of the challenges or “reverse salients” they faced, or of the social groups influencing the construction of technology. More recent ...
This thesis addresses the question of a patent value from three different angles. It comprises three papers on the patent valuation methods. The patent valuation issues are well-known to the world of research and practice. However, the debates over what th ...
The quality of novel technological innovations is extremely variable, and the ability to measure innovation quality is essential to sensible, evidence-based policy. Patents, an often vital precursor to a commercialised innovation, share this heterogeneous ...
Inventions of foreign origin are about ten percentage points less likely to be granted a U.S. patent than domestic inventions. An empirical analysis of 1.5 million U.S. patent applications identifies three systematic differences between foreign and domesti ...
As an important policy instrument for guiding innovation, the patent system involves a long-standing tension between creating economic rewards for the original innovators and stifling subsequent R&D activities. The availability of new data allows us to pr ...