Current Research Projects

Dynamic Interfaces and Post-Deployment Innovation in Software-Defined Devices (SDX)

The concept of being “software-defined” (SD) has proliferated rapidly across industry and academia, from software-defined networking (SDN) to software-defined vehicles (SDV). Yet the term still lacks a rigorous theoretical foundation. The existing literature either conflates software-defined architectures with “software-enabled” products or treats their distinctiveness as given. This highlights a critical gap in our understanding of how these architectures differ from conventional modular systems and of their economic implications.

This research addresses that gap by building on and extending Baldwin & Clark’s modularity theory. Classical modularity theory assumes that interfaces are stable and co-determined at design time. However, in software-defined architectures, the constitutive elements of an interface (syntax, semantics, and protocol) are decoupled through programmable abstraction layers. This enables semantic evolution, which refers to changes in the meaning and behaviour of an interface without structural changes to the underlying hardware. Tesla’s over-the-air (OTA) updates to braking coordination exemplify this, but the phenomenon extends well beyond a single firm or industry – reaching even beyond earthly borders to software-defined satellites, which are increasingly built to be reprogrammed mid-mission. What economic mechanisms govern this capacity for post-deployment innovation, how firms capture value from it, and where its boundaries lie across device categories remain open and consequential questions.

Contact: Nicole Wenger-Wong

Standard-essential patent licensing and technology adoption in connectivity standards

Communication standards such as 5G and Wi-Fi rely on standard-essential patents (SEPs) whose owners are obliged to license on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. The interpretation of this commitment remains contentious, and established approaches to FRAND rate determination lack an anchor in economic reasoning. Beyond cellular and Wi-Fi, connectivity standards for emerging domains such as smart cities and IoT also vary fundamentally in their licensing regimes, ranging from SEP royalty obligations embedded in standardised technologies like NB-IoT to open ecosystem governance models such as LoRaWAN. These differences may systematically shape adoption decisions, yet their role has not been isolated empirically.

In our research, we investigate the economics of SEP licensing and its downstream consequences for technology adoption. In a mixed-methods approach, we combine expert interviews with large-scale quantitative data on standard participation, patenting activity, and licensing revenues. We examine the relationship between standard development costs and realised SEP royalties. Extending this perspective to the adopter level, we study how licensing-regime features predict technology choice, network setup, and use case deployment in German smart cities through a longitudinal panel survey.

Contact: Christian Untch

Strategic extension development in open instruction set architectures

The RISC-V instruction set architecture has emerged as a prominent open standard in the semiconductor industry, challenging the dominance of proprietary architectures such as Arm and x86. A defining feature of RISC-V is its modular extensibility: firms can develop custom instruction set extensions tailored to specific application domains, enabling differentiation on top of a shared architectural foundation. This has attracted a diverse ecosystem of companies, each navigating a fundamental tension between contributing extensions to the open standard, publishing them as vendor-specific additions, or keeping them entirely proprietary.

Contributing an extension to the ratified standard can drive ecosystem-wide adoption and toolchain support, but risks commoditizing a source of competitive advantage. Retaining extensions as proprietary preserves differentiation yet may limit compatibility as the ecosystem converges around shared standards. In this research project, we investigate the strategic dynamics of extension development in the RISC-V ecosystem, seeking to understand how the interplay between open standardization and proprietary innovation shapes firms' revealing strategies and the trajectory of architectural evolution.

Contact: Dekai Xiao

Selective revealing in open-source artificial intelligence

In the fierce competition for dominance in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), exclusivity in data and derived models has been identified as a primary source of competitive advantage by researchers and practitioners. Following traditional private investment theorizing, such exclusive resources should be preserved and capitalized upon. Most prominently, OpenAI exemplifies this approach, having predominantly focused on developing proprietary closed-source models. Seemingly contradictory, not all companies adhere to the aforementioned rationale, with some opting to reveal their valuable resources to the public. A case in point is Meta's launch of Llama 3, an open-source large language model that exhibits performance comparable to state-of-the-art proprietary models.

In this research project, we investigate the above-described developments in the field of open-source AI that have brought renewed attention to open-sourcing and selective revealing – phenomena that were initially researched in the context of open-source software over two decades ago. While underlying principles may still apply, we expect crucial mechanisms to be shaped in novel ways by the unique characteristics of AI technology to explain recent observations. Thus, we seek to understand: What motivates technology companies to open-source their AI resources while others choose not to? And how do the unique AI characteristics influence the companies’ revealing strategies?

Contact: Leonard Hanschur

Patent pools’ growth dynamics

When patent holders collaborate to collectively license their patents, they form what is commonly known as "patent pool". More than two decades after the US Department of Justice’s (USDOJ) legal and antitrust deregulation of patent pools in 1997, these entities are undergoing a process of modernization, improving their licensing arrangements, royalty rate schemes, and commercial behaviors. Especially in the context of Information Communication Technology (ICT), patent pools of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) have seen a growing recognition of their significance due to their benefits in offering a streamlined mechanism for licensing. To some extent, this fosters higher levels of transparency and predictability within the SEP ecosystem. Nonetheless, economic literature and real-world instances have demonstrated that patent pools often experience commercial failure with a subsequent shutdown of the licensing program or a merger with other pools. Hence, a pressing question arises: under which renewed conditions do patent pools related to ICT standards emerge and successfully compete with their peers? By identifying the incentives for licensors and licensees to join pools through a mixed-methods study, we seek to understand the underlying causes and motivations behind the dynamic emergence of patent pools.

Contact: Pietro Fantini