Join us for the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research Seminar Series 22/23, webinar hosted by Professor Elisa Giuliani and Dr Gianluca Biggi from REMARC – Responsible Management Research Center, University of Pisa.
Register to attend via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/manchester-institute-of-innovation-researchelisa-giuliani-gianluca-biggi-tickets-417812166437
Zooming into the earth of patents: Methodological steps to examine their potential harms
Abstract:
The important role of innovation in promoting aggregate economic growth and the performance of individual firms has been long recognized in economics, management, and beyond. In the literature on innovation, patent data are widely accepted and employed to measure innovative activities which are otherwise hardly traceable. Over the years, scholars have developed a range of patent indicators to not only measure innovation via patent counts but also to characterize the underlying individual inventions. More recently, researchers started to apply advanced computational methods such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI-based machine learning to derive more refined measures from the full text of patent documents. The above-mentioned patent indicators, including the more recent NLP and AI-based measures, have the advantage that they can be computed and applied across technologies. The downside of this generalizability is that they are restricted in identifying information which is specific to certain technology fields. This is particularly salient in fields such as chemistry, where patents protect inventions regarding the molecular structure of specific compounds. Here, the full text of a patent document is less important compared to the information contained in the molecular structure. As a result, commonly applied patent indicators are not capable of exploiting the information that is contained in the molecules’ chemical structures for which patents claim exclusivity. In this overview of our research agenda we seek to address this shortcomings by introducing the way which specific patent indicators can be constructed exploiting the molecular structure of compounds contained in the patent document to investigate the extent to which a patent includes chemical compounds that are toxic to humans and/or the environment.
Speaker Bio’s:
Elisa Giuliani is Professor at the Department of Economics & Management of the University of Pisa, and Director of the Responsible Management Research Center (REMARC). She has been Visiting Professor at DMT – Bocconi University (2019-2020); MIT Sloan School of Management (2017-2018) and University of Lund (2013-2016). Earlier in her career she has been ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellow at SPRU- University of Sussex (2005-2006) and Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (2004-2005). She holds a PhD in Science and Technology Policy from SPRU (2005) and a PhD in Management from the University of Pisa (2002). Her research focuses on innovation, sustainable development and responsible management. She is Editor for Research Policy, in the Editorial Boards of Economic Geography, the Journal of Economic Geography and the Business and Human Rights Journal. She is a member of the Regional Studies Association Research Committee and part of the Editorial Review Boards of Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of International Business Policy and Management and Organization Review.
Gianluca Biggi holds a PhD from the University of Pisa and has been PhD visiting scholar at UCL. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in management at REMARC – Responsible Management Research Center, University of Pisa. His research focuses on the nature and dynamics of chemical innovation. Grounded in the broader area of innovation studies, his research explores the extent and modalities under which firms react to regulations in their corporate and innovative strategies. He uses patent data as measures of innovation and knowledge flows. During his PhD, he contributed to the development of a novel methodology combining the extraction of the chemical content from patents with computational chemistry techniques to understand the nature of chemical inventions. He is the recipient of the 2022 Bernardo Nobile Best PhD Dissertation Award and finalist in the “That’s interesting!” Award at the Academy of International Business in 2020. Gianluca has published in Research Policy and Industry & Innovation.
The Manchester Institute of Innovation Research runs a series of regular seminars given by visiting speakers to Manchester. These seminars are open to anybody who is interested in science, technology and innovation policy and management.
