Research Opportunities

Prospective PhD students are encouraged to apply to the Doctoral Program in Management of Technology.

PhD students and more established researchers are always welcome to the chair for a visit. Please contact Prof. de Rassenfosse directly.

Research Opportunities

We have a number of research projects suitable for master or PhD students (not all of them are listed here). Please contact Prof. de Rassenfosse for more information.

Nowcasting patent statistics – Patent statistics are subject to a considerable time lag, which limit their attractiveness for policy makers and the media. This project seeks to establish a sound methodology for nowcasting the worldwide count of priority filings described in [1]. Suitable for a PhD student or a master student with good knowledge of econometrics.

A ranking of scientific journals based on a latent quality measure – This project relies on novel indicator of journal quality and impact to derive a ranking of journal in the fields of innovation & entrepreneurship. Suitable for a PhD student or a master student with good knowledge of econometrics and Python scripting language (web scraping).

A study of the productivity of research using patent data – A well-known limitation of patent data is that not all inventions are patentable, not all patentable inventions are patented, and many patents are worthless. As a result, it makes it difficult to assess the productivity of research using patent data. This project aims to extract the productivity of research from patent data. It seeks to improve [2] by using latent variable models and several quality indicators. Suitable for a PhD student or a master student with good programming skills and good knowledge of Stata and MySQL.

Meta-analysis of the R&D-patent relationship – Economists have not been able to pin down the elasticity of patent numbers with respect to R&D investments. Elasticity estimates vary widely and are affected by various methodological choices such as the patent indicators used, the econometric methodologies adopted and the type of firms and industries covered. Yet, accurate estimates would help shed light on the returns to R&D, the value of patents, and the relevance of patent data to monitor innovation activities. This project seeks to perform a meta-analysis of R&D-patent studies in order to gain novel insights from the large body of literature published. Suitable for a PhD student or a master student.