STAR AND PROLIFIC INVENTORS: EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PATENTS

STAR AND PROLIFIC INVENTORS: EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PATENTS Starting from the basic topics of invention, innovation and inventors, the last group will be further analyzed by introducing two categories: “Star Inventors” and “Prolific Inventors” depending on the participation as a finalist or winner at the EPO Award competition. Chapter 2 of the thesis summarizes a description of the current literature regarding these two categories of inventors and the main literary achievements. As the final aim of the work is understanding the differences between these two groups of inventors by comparing the features of the patents filed by each of them, an overview of the main social prizes is presented with particular interest to the EPO Patent Award. According to this point of view, an accurate description will follow of Intellectual Property rights focused on Patent and Patent Application with the aim of providing the reader with the main technical knowledge needed to understand the following analysis. Chapter 3 mainly deals with the method used to gather inventors’ patent data. It describes the use of the Derwent Innovation software, the method of exporting patents’ data using the appropriate query and the main issue we had to face: the homonymy. A description of the disambiguation technique used to solve that problem is given. Chapter 4 gives an overview of inventors’ biographical, educational and career statistics (e.g. accomplishment of a Bachelor degree, a Master degree, a PhD, abroad study experience, international work experience, experience as an entrepreneur, working experience in a company or in a university). These variables will be important because they are control variables of logit regression analysis of chapter 6. Chapter 5 introduces the reader to the main patent variables used to demonstrate the existence of a difference between Star and Prolific Inventors. These will be the independent variables of the logit regression. Chapter 6 gives the reader the results of the regression analysis.