Data on the number of international patent requests from Spain and Portugal and data from the European Innovation Scoreboard show that there is a low level of IPR use in both countries, particularly in Portugal. But the annual rate of growth is high. Participation of Universities measured in % is high, which reflects the effort put in the technology transfer offices (OTRI and GAPI/OTIC) but reflects also a culture of lack of protection of IPR by the industry. Industry-University relations are moving to an “open innovation” paradigm, and some areas, such as biotechnology, are strongly based on university research and university entrepreneurship. Data from the European Union and RedOTRI reflect the strong and weak points of the innovation culture and enable an international comparison of trends. More data are required on commercialization activities and on the fate of university spin-offs (success rates, jobs created, turnover, licensing) to better understand these trends and how IP rights are used

Nowadays about 56% of the European patents demands belong to non-EU residents. If a cheap and easy to obtain European patent would be enacted, that quantity could rise to 75% or even more. In this hypothesis, European industry would be affected by an invasion of foreign patents that could erode its firms’ competitiveness. In the Spanish case, the effects would be even higher, because the relatively reduced capability of Spanish industry to create patents.

An important factor in the competitiveness of the economy of a region or a country is based on the capabilities they have to stimulate the innovation and the technological development. Patents are good indicators of the organization’s output and their analysis contributes to bring relevant information on the set of processes of technological innovation, offering a global vision of the technological capacities available by the organization. Although the existing studies make an effort in order to identify to what extent this technological innovation has its origin in national processes or, otherwise, it is transferred by means of patents licenses, imports, imitations or foreign direct investments, it is also interesting to know to what extent our organizations carry out efforts to internationalize the own developed and protected technology through patents. In this work we analyze the impact of the aids granted by the Spanish Office of Patents and Marks to support the extension of the patents of national origin, through the analysis of different generic variables (type of applicant, geographic location, company size, CNAE and CIP), economic variables (extension costs) and quality variables (affected vindications).

Top managers are empowered to make strategic decisions to address the direction of the entities they manage, converting these decisions into tools of adaptability and organizational improvement. At the same time, each of the decisions and their results, whether they are successes or failures, allow the managers to consciously or unconsciously get involved in a learning process that materializes in their change of attitude. That is, learning, understood as the process through which integrates knowledge, skills and attitudes to achieve changes or improvements of conduct, is the inevitable result that the managers get, after carrying out decision-making processes. This article describes how such learning is generated facing the social corporative responsibility (CSR) as a tool for social legitimization.

From mass production in the earliest 20th century to the Toyota’s flexible concepts of manufacturing, the automobile industry has undergone quite significant changes over the last twenty century. The most remarkable of these changes has been an increase in the intensity of competition and the relentless innovation activity in the industry. This paper deals with the effects of supplier and buyer market relations, and the appropriability conditions on the innovative behaviour of these relations.