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Open research questions in Intellectual Property and Patents

40 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 1,827 Intellectual Property and Patents papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • If the holders themselves are empowered, they can not only be able to enforce the legal IP rights in their favour, but also be able to build a decent livelihood out of their practice, thereby creating a sustainable economy which will go a long way for countries like India where capital is scarce in case of middle and small sector economies and yet population of traditional knowledge holders is high.

    How Community Empowerment through Intellectual Property Protection of Traditional Knowledge Fosters Sustainable Innovation · 2026 · DOI

  • Estimating v(S) from real data is the primary open problem; we distinguish this from the computational contribution and outline a concrete roadmap for empirical validation using public ETSI, USPTO, and Lens.

    A Framework for Graph-Conditioned Hierarchical Shapley Attribution in Patent Valuation · 2026

  • Research Conclusions Identifying technological opportunities is essential for forward-looking planning of future industrial technologies, guiding the allocation of research resources, and supporting national science and technology strategic decision-making. From the perspective of the science–technology gap, this study integrates semantic information from scientific papers and patents to construct two indicators – Scientific Knowledge Reserve Rate (SKRR) and Technological Invention Competitiveness (TIC) – and identifies technological opportunities through a composite mapping approach. Using scientific publications and patent data in the 6G domain as the research context, this study identifies eight potential technological opportunities: AIoT and edge intelligence, space– air–ground integrated networks and low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication systems, massive MIMO and cellfree networks, ultra-reliable low-latency communications, reinforcement learning and resource allocation, visible light and terahertz communications, semantic communication and neural networks, and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces and their applications. These directions not only reflect the multi-dimensional integration and intelligent evolution trends of future network architectures but also reveal potential transformation pathways from scientific research to technological applications.

    Identifying Technological Opportunities in 6G Frontier Technologies: A Science-Technology Semantic Association and Combination Graph Approach · 2026 · DOI

  • The scope of the study is limited to the specific legal documents in the field of artificial intelligence, the financial mechanisms that Europe applies to stimulate research in this field, as well as to the applications filed and patents granted for technologies in the field of artificial intelligence, namely: machine understanding technologies.

    Strategies and Policies to Support the Development of AI Technologies in Europe · 2023 · DOI

  • To address this problem, there are tools that help expand queries to increase recall so as not to miss good documents, however, it remains an open problem dealing with misspellings-based strategies.

    Investigating the Impacts of Misspellings in Patent Search by Combining Natural Language Tools and Rule-Based Approaches · 2022 · DOI

  • There is no eBay, Amazon, New York Stock Exchange, or Kelley's Blue Book equivalent for patents, and when buyers and sellers do manage to find each other, they usually negotiate under enormous uncertainty: prices of similar patents vary widely from transaction to transaction and the terms of the transactions (including prices) are often secret and confidential.

    The New Patent Intermediaries: Platforms, Defensive Aggregators, and Super-Aggregators · 2013 · DOI

  • (11) The patent examiner rejected Bilski's application, stating that because it was not limited to a practical application of abstract idea of hedging risk, it was not directed to technological arts.

    Patentable Subject Matter in Bilski V. Kappos · 2011

  • 2001 ), but it is clear that the act reinforced the patenting norm in research universities and mandated a technology transfer infrastructure at those universities that had not yet established a technology licensing office.

    Patents and Innovation in Cancer Therapeutics: Lessons from CellPro · 2002 · DOI

  • 9It remains to be seen whether the open nature of the Internet will survive this shift to proprietary standards, 10 but in any event the magnitude of the stakes should be clear.

    Intellectual Property Rights and Standard-Setting Organizations · 2002 · DOI

  • The general considerations and the provided analyses of similarities and differences have been used for further research on the possible overlapping between patent and industrial design rights.

    The cumulation of intellectual property rights, with specific reference to the cumulation of patent and design rights · 2024 · DOI

  • Based on the conducted research, the author concludes that there are insufficient arguments for a general prohibition of all these cumulations; thus, overlaps in each of these areas have to be regulated separately.

    The cumulation of intellectual property rights, with specific reference to the cumulation of patent and design rights · 2024 · DOI

  • However, many users have limited knowledge of patents and search strategies, so they must use intuitive, often approximate approaches that can lead to highly inaccurate searches and be time-consuming.

    Investigating the Impacts of Misspellings in Patent Search by Combining Natural Language Tools and Rule-Based Approaches · 2022 · DOI

  • The share of academic patents is higher in Eastern Europe and in regions where innovative companies are lacking, in capital regions, and in regions with a strong tradition in academic patenting.

    Development of Academic Patenting in European Regions – A Large Scale Analysis · 2022 · DOI

  • Although there are studies that focus on regional clustering of economic activity and technological dispersion of sectors in Turkey, little is known related to the regions’ potential to attract new technologies based on their core strenghts.

    Knowledge Space, Relatedness and Complexity: A Regional Analysis in Turkey · 2021 · DOI

  • We combine the technology efforts made by countries and their contribution to high-technology exports in order to explain a mechanism through which strong PRs contribute to economic growth, as such a channel remains unexplored in the current literature.

    Patent Protection, Technological Efforts, And Exports: An Empirical Investigation · 2019 · DOI

  • We exploit a relatively under-studied feature of patent families, namely the number of patents covering the same invention within a given jurisdiction.

    International patent families: from application strategies to statistical indicators · 2017 · DOI

  • It suggests that globalization of innovation is a means of acquiring competences abroad that are lacking at home, rather than a way to exploit home technological strengths.

    Globalization of innovation production: A patent-based industry analysis · 2016 · DOI

  • The effects of these determinations are not limited to the defaulting parties, but applied widely through the in rem relief of general exclusion orders, enforced at the border to keep infringing goods out of the country.

    Patents Absent Adversaries · 2016

  • This is problematic both because it undermines the agencies' credibility and because it will remain unclear whether ex ante licensing negotiations are in fact desirable.

    Why the Enforcement Agencies' Recent Efforts Will Not Encourage Ex Ante Licensing Negotiations in Standard-Setting Organizations* · 2011

  • By requiring that patent claims be limited to a specific set of practical applications of an idea, the abstract ideas doctrine both makes the scope of the resulting patent clearer and leaves room for subsequent inventors to improve upon - and patent new applications of - the same basic principle.

    Life After Bilski · 2011

  • ” In fact, we estimate that a recruit's exploitation of her own prior ideas accounts for almost half of the above effect, with much of the diffusion to others being limited to the recruit's immediate collaborative network.

    Recruiting for Ideas: How Firms Exploit the Prior Inventions of New Hires · 2010 · DOI

  • Because the Constitution expressly grants to Congress the power to regulate substantive patent law, the local patent-reform movement is limited to the development and utilization of local procedural rules to streamline patent litigation in federal district courts.

    Dynamic Federalism and Patent Law Reform · 2010

  • For these reasons, when the Supreme Court speaks regarding the scope of a research exemption, a close look at the scope of the exemption is warranted.

    Merck V. Integra: (Section) 271(e)(1) and the Common Law Research Exemption · 2007

  • The relationship between the degree of competition in product markets and the preferred patent licensing mechanism, to the best of our knowledge, has not been addressed in the literature previously and represents a useful source of new empirical implications.

    THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PATENT LICENSING AND COMPETITIVE BEHAVIOR* · 2005 · DOI

  • Despite the high relevance of firms’ portfolios of upstream interfirm agreements in technology-intensive markets, little is known about their impact on innovative success.

    Portfolios of Interfirm Agreements in Technology-Intensive Markets: Consequences for Innovation and Profitability · 2004 · DOI

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40 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 1,827 Intellectual Property and Patents papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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