TECHNIS is pleased to invite you to a free webinar. TECHNIS webinars focus on recent legal, economic, managerial, ethical and policy issues related to technological innovation. Our approach is interdisciplinary and presentations are given by experts in different fields such as economics, law, management, STS, sociology, anthropology and philosophy. Webinar presentations last for 20min and are followed by a 40min discussion.

Please join us for a webinar on Tuesday the 2nd of December 2025 at 11:00 London time i.e. 12:00 Brussels time, 13:00 Athens time. The speaker is Bernhard Ganglmair, University of Mannheim. The title of the talk is "Looking for Innovation Beyond the Patent System: Evidence from Research Disclosures" .

This webinar is free and open to all. The moderator is Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos. 

Join Zoom Meeting: https://uoc-gr.zoom.us/j/84642993639?pwd=4mpCWh3kXwL7TeODcCa7UZ9cKEbbYU.1

Meeting ID: 846 4299 3639
Passcode: 532636

NOTE: To participate please contact Andreas Panagopoulos at least an hour prior to the webinar.

Abstract: We study the content, novelty, and value of defensive publications relative to patents. We use a large language model (LLM) to apply the cooperative patent classification (CPC) system to a set of defensive publications (from 1962 to 2022) from the journal Research Disclosure, thus mapping such research disclosures and patents into a common space and allowing for a direct evaluation of textual similarities between these two types of R\&D outputs. We find that, while in some technologies patents and research disclosures follow similar aggregate trends, in others they exhibit diverging developments over time. We also document shifts in the position of research disclosures in the patenting space that indicate changes in the technological landscape not captured in patents. We further show that substantial numbers of research disclosures are published before their closest patents are filed, and many contain terminology before it is first used in patents. Last, we find that in several technology areas, research disclosures have evolved from an outlet for niche results to a vehicle for publicizing technological developments of high practical relevance and value. Our results imply that when we draw conclusions about the nature of technological progress or the direction of innovation based solely on patent data, we obtain an incomplete picture.

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Short Bio: Bernhard Ganglmair is an associate professor of economics at the University of Mannheim and the head of the junior research group Competition and Innovation at the ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research. He is a board member of the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation (MaCCI) and an associate editor at the International Journal of Industrial Organization and Economic Inquiry. Bernhard's research covers a variety of topics related to technology standardization, innovation, contracts, and competition economics with a particular focus on strategic disclosure of private information. His methodological toolkit contains both theory and empirics (including text-as-data methods). He has published his work in leading journals such as the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Research Policy, the RAND Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. Before joining the University of Mannheim and ZEW Mannheim in 2019, Bernhard was an assistant professor of managerial economics at the University of Texas at Dallas. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Zurich (2011).

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