The first date of the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIOIR) Seminar Series 22/23 will be hosted by Elisa Giuliani and Gianluca Biggi on ‘Zooming into the hearth of patents: Methodological steps to examine their potential harms’
The registration link to the event is via Eventbrite at the following link.
About the event
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.
