We thank Rishab Ghosh and the participants in the EC DG IT study on "The effects of allowing patents claims for computer-implemented inventions" for discussing with us several issues concerning patents and IPR. Moreover, we would like to thank Armando Benincasa from Bureau Van Dijk, Elvio Ciccardini, and Gianluca Tarasconi from CESPRI-Bocconi University for their valuable assistance in data collection. Colin Webb has provided us with data on citations to EPO patents. Comments from seminar and conference participants at CESPRI-Bocconi University, NBER,

Academics and policy makers are questioning about the relation between science and technology in the emerging field of nano science and technology (NST) and the effectiveness of different institutional regimes. We analyze the performance of inventors in the NST using multiple indicators. We clustered patents in three groups according to the scientific curricula of the inventors. The first two groups are composed by patents whose inventors all are authors of at least one scientific publication in the NST or none of them have obtained a scientific publication in that field respectively. Thirdly, we isolated those patents that have at least one inventor, who is also author of at least one scientific publication in the NST. The underlining presumption of this classification is that of a proxy of different institutional complementarities of the inventive collective action in NST.

The literature on organizational learning asserts that external learning is often limited geographically and technologically. We scrutinize to what extent organizations acquire external knowledge by accessing external knowledge repositories. We argue that professional service firms (PSFs) grant access to nonlocalized knowledge repositories and thereby not only facilitate external learning but also help to overcome localization. Focusing on patent law firms, we test our predictions using a unique dataset of 544,820 pairs of European patent applications. Analyzing patterns of knowledge flows captured in patent citations, we find that accessing a PSF's repository facilitates the acquisition of external knowledge. As the effect is more pronounced for knowledge that is distant to a focal organization, we conclude that having access to a knowledge repository compensates for localization disadvantages. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We take a first look at financial patents at the European Patent Office (EPO). As is the case at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the number of financial patents in Europe has increased significantly in parallel with significant changes in payment and financial systems. Scholars have argued that financial patents, like other business methods patents, have low value and are owned for strategic reasons rather than for protecting real inventions. We find that established firms in non-financial sectors with diversified patent portfolios own a large share of financial patents at the EPO. However, new specialized technology providers in the financial area also hold a number of such patents. Decisions on the financial patent applications take longer and they are more likely to be refused by the patent office, suggesting greater uncertainty over validity than for other patents. They are also more likely to be opposed, which is consistent with the fact that their other economic value indicators are higher. ABSTRACTWe take a first look at financial patents at the European Patent Office (EPO). As is the case at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the number of financial patents in Europe has increased significantly in parallel with significant changes in payment and financial systems. Scholars have argued that financial patents, like other business methods patents, have low value and are owned for strategic reasons rather than for protecting real inventions. We find that established firms in non-financial sectors with diversified patent portfolios own a large share of financial patents at the EPO. However, new specialized technology providers in the financial area also hold a number of such patents. Decisions on the financial patent applications take longer and they are more likely to be refused by the patent office, suggesting greater uncertainty over validity than for other patents. They are also more likely to be opposed, which is consistent with the fact that their other economic value indicators are higher.

L. Bocconi in Milan for very fruitful discussions. We also thank Armando Benincasa and Luisa Quarta from Bureau Van Dijk for clarifications about the structure of the Amadeus database and its changes over time. Thoma and Hall are grateful to the Kauffman Foundation for support of some of this work. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

We thank Rishab Ghosh and the participants in the EC DG IT study on "The effects of allowing patents claims for computer-implemented inventions" for discussing with us several issues concerning patents and IPR. Moreover, we would like to thank Armando Benincasa from Bureau Van Dijk, Elvio Ciccardini, and Gianluca Tarasconi from CESPRI-Bocconi University for their valuable assistance in data collection. Colin Webb has provided us with data on citations to EPO patents. Comments from seminar and conference participants at CESPRI-Bocconi University, NBER,

No abstract

Small-medium enterprises (SMEs) encounter financial constraints when they try to obtain credit from banks. These constraints are particularly severe for innovative SMEs. Thus, developing models for innovative SMEs that provide reliable estimates of their probabilities of default (PD) is important because the PDs can also serve as ratings. We examine the role of innovative assets such as patents in credit risk modelling due to their signaling value. Specifically, we add to a logit model two innovation-related variables in order to account for both the dimension and the value of the patent portfolio. Based on a unique data set of innovative SMEs with default years of 2005–2008, we show that, although the value of the patent portfolio always reduces the PD, its dimension reduces the firm’s riskiness only if coupled with an appropriate equity level