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This paper documents the generation and the content of the Comprehensive Patent Database (CPDB) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (1949-1990), Version 1.1, which is freely available at GESIS https://doi.org/10.7802/2423. The database contains all patents granted in the GDR and published by the Office of Inventions and Patents (AfEP, later: German Patent and Trade Mark Office/DPMA) in the period between 1 January 1939 (application before but granted in the GDR) and 29 June 2006 (application in but granted after the GDR). The core database covers the years 1950 to 1990 and contains 24 variables with manually cleaned and processed information on a total of 261,822 unique patents of the GDR. The data was collected and prepared for the purpose of research on innovation activity in the GDR.

This paper contributes to the discussion on exploration and exploitation by analyzing the innovation behavior of SMEs and large firms during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. It provides a novel way to measure the type of firm innovation behavior in a dynamically changing environment. After collecting news articles about innovation activities conducted by firms, we applied text mining techniques to identify the positioning of each firm on the continuum from exploitation to exploration. The results of our analyses indicate three main dynamics: 1) all studied firms tend to conduct more explorative innovation activities during the COVID-19 crisis, 2) large and “technology-intensive” firms are more prone to perform explorative innovation activities than SMEs and firms that are not “technology-intensive”, and 3) technology intensity is associated with explorative innovation behavior during the crisis. Our results suggest that considering technology intensity and the size of firms is important for designing effective policies during crises. 2203

This paper investigates the impact of applicant and inventor team composition on patent commercialization in form of product creation. It outlines the importance of applicant and inventor team characteristics, i.e. specifically, size and internationality, on the speed of market authorization of a patent-related product and on the product quality. The analysis is performed for the European pharmaceutical industry. The product data is taken from the European Medicines Agency website for the period 2010-2019. Manual patent-product concordance is established with the help of the Pat-INFORMED database from the World Intellectual Property Organization and the Health Canada database. The created dataset presents combined data on patent and product characteristics. Results from an accelerated failure time model show that larger applicant teams as well as the presence of international applicants and inventors decelerate the market authorization of patent-related products. Results of the probit analysis show that larger inventor teams lead to patents of higher quality. 2110

The present thesis consists of four papers dealing with the topic of innovations, leading to industry transformation for the case of biotechnology in Germany. Based on the evolutionary and Neo-Schumpeterian economics framework, empirical papers investigate the role of science-technology interaction, formal and informal networks for the industry development. Apart from that, the importance of special kind of innovation (radical innovation) as well as the role of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in that context is outlined. This thesis provides the empirical evidence for the significance of peer networks for the firm innovations, both intra- and interregional, within and between connected subfields.