Roadblock to Innovation: The Role of Patent Litigation in Corporate R&D
Filippo Mezzanotti
A new study on the impact of a patent-policy change on corporate R&D spending and innovation.
Category: Research
The Business of Artificial Intelligence Startups
James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Lydia Reichensperger, and Robert Seamans
A new survey of AI startups offers insight into AI’s impact on jobs and the economy, including data suggesting a competitive market for startups and the use of AI to enhance rather than replace human labor.
The Policy Challenge of Artificial Intelligence
James Bessen
Across all major sectors of the economy, proprietary information technology is increasing the market dominance of large firms, which is evidence of a slowdown in the spread of technical knowledge throughout the economy. The result is rising industry concentration, slower productivity growth and growing wage inequality. The key challenge to IP and antitrust policy will be counter this trend yet maintain innovation incentives.
Is Automation Labor-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share
David Autor and Anna Salomons
While many technological innovations replace workers with machines, what effect does that have on overall employment and productivity? This paper explores automation’s impact on total employment and aggregate demand.
Patent Policy and American Innovation after eBay: An Empirical Examination
Timothy Simcoe and Filippo Mezzanotti
After the Supreme Court ruled that courts should not automatically enter injunctions against patent infringers, some commentators feared that the decision would hinder innovation and growth in the U.S. More than ten years later, this paper examines the data to see whether those fears came true.
AI and the Economy
Robert Seamans and Jason Furman
Is artificial intelligence (AI) having a large effect on the economy? A variety of statistics—including robotics shipments, AI startups, and patent counts—show a large increase in AI-related activity. AI and robotics also have the potential to increase productivity growth but may cause labor market upheaval. This paper explores some strategies and policies for dealing with this upheaval.
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Innovation
Iain Cockburn, Rebecca Henderson, and Scott Stern.
Can artificial intelligence serve as a new general-purpose “method of invention” that can reshape the nature of the innovation process and the organization of R&D? Research suggests that this may lead to a significant substitution away from more routinized labor-intensive research towards research that takes advantage of the interplay between passively generated large datasets and enhanced prediction algorithms. The authors suggest that policies which encourage transparency and sharing of core datasets across both public and private actors may be critical tools for stimulating research productivity and innovation-oriented competition.
Search Engines and Data Retention: Implications for Privacy and Antitrust
Lesley Chiou and Catherine Tucker
Does Big Data give large companies an unfair competitive advantage? New machine learning technologies depend on access to large amounts of data. This means that large companies might be able to use their huge stores of data to provide better products and services than smaller rivals and startups. Or not…
Research Summary: Does Big Data favor big companies?
Automation and Jobs: When technology boosts employment
James Bessen
Will industries use new information technologies to eliminate jobs? Sometimes productivity-enhancing technology increases industry employment instead. In manufacturing, jobs grew along with productivity for a century or more; only later did productivity gains bring declining employment. What changed? Markets became saturated.
Research Summary: Why Isn’t Automation Creating Unemployment?
How Essential are Standard-Essential Patents?
Mark Lemley and Timothy Simcoe
This paper explores what happens when standard-essential patents (SEPs) go to court. The authors found that, contrary to their expectations, SEPs are more likely to be held valid than non-SEP patents, but they are significantly less likely to be infringed. In other words, SEPs, once in court, do not seem to be all that essential. One cause, the authors found, comes from the assertion of SEP patent rights by so-called patent trolls, which has implications in policy debates over both SEPs and patent trolls.