Dear TEKPOL Partners,

We will be proceeding with TEKPOL Pizza Seminars in Spring Semester 2024, with valuable on-line and in-person guests throughout the year.

Our second guest this semester will be Gaétan de Rassenfosse, from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. His presentation title will be; Market Entry Timing and Patent Office Delays.

The seminar will be held on 8 March (Friday) 2024, at 12:30 pm Turkey time (GMT +3) through Microsoft Teams. Meeting link will be shared with the registered participants before the session.

The moderation of the seminar will be conducted by Prof. Semih Akcomak from METU TEKPOL.

Registration is mandatory and the form can be reached through this link:

https://forms.gle/CAQKGCc8FyAgFwnX9

It is possible to register until Thursday evening before the seminar (7 March 2024)

Hope to see you there.

TEKPOL Team

About Gaétan de Rassenfosse:

Gaétan de Rassenfosse an Associate Professor in Science and Technology Policy at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland). He joined the College of Management of Technology at EPFL in 2014. Before that, he was a research fellow and then a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia, from 2010 to 2014. He obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from the Solvay Business School at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, in 2010. He was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley (California, USA) in 2018 and MIT (Massachusetts, USA) in the summer of 2019.

The objective of his research is to provide the policy environment that best addresses the needs of the knowledge economy. This objective is met by producing sound empirical evidence on research questions related to science, technology, and innovation policy issues, with a particular interest in intellectual property. His work appeared in international peer-reviewed scientific journals such as the Journal of Industrial Economics, Journal of Law & Economics, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Research Policy, and European Economic Review. He's an experienced speaker with over 200 conferences and seminars worldwide. He received more than $3 million in research funding from institutions including, the U.S. NSF, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Swiss Network for International Studies, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the European Patent Office.

About the Seminar:

The timing of product market introduction is an important decision of a firm's commercialization strategy. In the case of patent-protected innovative products, delays at the patent office may affect the timing. Indeed, it takes the USPTO about 3 to 5 years—sometimes much longer—to examine and issue patents. Launching a product before obtaining a formal notice of patent allowance exposes a firm to litigation risk. However, waiting for a patent grant may impose significant financial burdens on the firm due to delayed product launches, missed market opportunities, and incurred holding costs. We understand very little about how delays at the patent office affect product commercialization strategy. This paper investigates the effect of patent office delays on product market introduction using a unique linked patent-product dataset. Results from Instrumental Variable and Cox Proportional Hazards regression models suggest a sizeable effect. We find that a patent grant increases the hazard of commercialization by 44 percent.