Patents, Freedom to Operate, and Follow-on Innovation: Evidence from Post-Grant Opposition

The authors thank Ashish Arora for invaluable guidance throughout the review process; the associate editor and three reviewers for constructive comments and suggestions; Alberto Galasso, Klaus Gugler, Peter Haan, Christian Helmers, Jussi Heikkilä, Robin Mamrak, Yassine Lefouili, Yann Ménière, Maikel Pellens, Bhaven Sampat, Mark Schankerman, Tetsuo Wada, and Stefan Wagner for feedback on the paper; and participants for comments at the 16th Roundtable for Engineering Entrepreneurship Research (REER) Conference, the Annual Meeting of the Committee for Industrial Economics, the ZEW/MaCCI Conference on the Economics of Innovation and Patenting, the Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Innovation (SEI) Faculty Workshop, the Munich Summer Institute, the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, the Searle Center/United States Patent and Trademark Office Conference on Innovation Economics, the Boston University IP Day, the Intellectual Property Statistics for Decision Makers (IPSDM) Conference, and the Centre for Competition Policy (CCP) Annual Conference. Earlier versions of this paper circulated under the title “Patents and Cumulative Innovation–Evidence from Post-Grant Patent Oppositions” and “Bargaining Failure and Freedom to Operate: Re-evaluating the Effect of Patents on Cumulative Innovation.”