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Private inventors are active patent applicants but lack the skills to prosecute their IP rights. While patents and patenting are studied immensely in the last decades, we have found the role of private inventors less covered. Our research focuses on private individuals’ involvement in patent prosecutions in the Finnish courts of law. We study the actions of private inventors to protect and enforce their intellectual property, and the types of legal actions they get dragged into. This paper uses a literature review and patent litigation data retrieved from the Darts-IP database and combined with patenting data from the Finnish patent and trademark office (PTO). Based on a conducted analysis we find that private inventors have high success in patent ownership disputes and low success in administrative hearings. In other types of cases they fare about as well as corporate litigants. This is somewhat surprising, as private inventors are usually thought to perform poorly in patent litigations. Our research, to our knowledge for the first time, provides empirical evidence of private inventors’ involvement and performance in patent litigations, in Finland and provides new insights to technology and innovation management in the intersection of judicial research. The results of this work are useful for academia, as well as for private inventors, entrepreneurs and small company managers for making knowledge-based decisions on inventions, patents and patenting. Post-print / Final draft

The objective of this study was to explore how the technology and the business of distributedenergy generation industry will change in the future, and what opportunities it couldoffer to Finnish industry. After the examination of the current state of distributed energygeneration and the cost-effectiveness analyses, the alternative scenarios were created bythe experts and actors to reveal the most plausible future development paths of the DEbusiness.During the scenario sessions, the main driving forces of the future development wereidentified. The most impacting drivers were determined: state of the infrastructure and thelevel of the regulation in business. After this, four different scenarios were developed todescribe the future business environment of the global business environment of the industry.With the help of scenarios and technology analysis, new business concept descriptionswere created for future market in the field of distributed energy systems. EU-15, Russia,India and China were seen as the most potential markets. In spite of found factors that arebarriers for business, great potential from the market was found for distributed energy systems.From the Finnish companies’ point of view, diesel- and gas reciprocating engines,wind power, small hydro power, and bio energy were considered as the most potentialtechnologies to generate new business.