In this book, Benassi and Martin-Sanchez offer an original and thorough analysis of the role of patent intermediaries in the genesis, maintenance and development of a market for patents. These patent intermediaries would be in the process of re-emerging after a first phase of appearance in the middle of the nineteenth century, following the separation between inventors and the owners of industrial property titles (Lamoreaux and Sokoloff, 2002). This market for technology would then have been dormant for more than a century, due to the integration of R&D activities in large companies.
What changes according to the authors is that the contemporary patent rush has been accompanied with new opportunities for the development of intermediaries whose business models go well beyond the traditional activity of ‘matchmaker’ between sellers and buyers. They assume multiple functions within increasingly diversified firms and behave like ‘marketmakers’, notably by aggregating paten...
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