Param Pal Singh Chhabra
(Advisors: Prof. Manpreet Hora and Prof. Karthik Ramachandran)
will defend a doctoral thesis entitled,
Essays on Funding and Patenting in the Innovation Process
On
Friday, January 7, 2022, at 11:30 am
Location: https://bluejeans.com/1659013566/
Abstract
Inventors often translate their ideas into commercially viable new products through a sequential process
called innovation value chain. First, I revisit the innovation value chain and study various innovation
platforms, such as crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and hackathons, highlighting the roles and challenges
of utilizing these platforms that create value by decoupling the different stages of the innovation value
chain. Next, I delve deeper into reward-based crowdfunding, which provides a signal of future demand,
and focus on an inventor's critical decision of reward-structure design, affecting the funding success of
the product. To test the hypotheses, I collect data from Kickstarter, the US's pre-eminent reward-based
crowdfunding platform. I find that a crowdfunding campaign's success improves with the number of
rewards but at a diminishing rate. Finally, inventors seek patents for technical viability that undergo a
patent examination for a long duration. I study the effect of longer patent pendency on the inventor's
effort allocation to innovative and routine activities through a multi-period analytical model, where belief
update about the expected patent pendency happens in a Bayesian framework. The analytical model's
results motivate the hypotheses, and I test it using patent data published by the United States Patent and
Trademark Office (USPTO). The empirical tests show significant evidence that patent pendency negatively
affects the future patenting activities of inventors.
Committee
 Prof. Manpreet Hora – Scheller College of Business (Co-Advisor)
 Prof. Karthik Ramachandran – Scheller College of Business (Co-Advisor)
 Prof. Cheryl Gaimon – Scheller College of Business
 Prof. Sridhar Narasimhan – Scheller College of Business
 Prof. Sreekumar Bhaskaran – Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University