Ideas, Inventions, and Regions

决策者的工作是将资源分配给工业研发和学术研究，他们对衡量专利的重要性有着至关重要的兴趣。 例如，如果今天的专利比昨天的专利更少但更好，那么观察到的专利申请率下降对技术变革和经济增长的未来没有什么意义。 本研究的目的是（1）衡量专利的重要性，以便更好地衡量专利的质量;（2）通过更好地了解技术网络，包括限制技术流动的地方化现象所带来的限制，来补充有关专利重要性的证据。通过进行测试，提供（3）比以前更好的证据，在公司，地区和国家层面上对规模报酬递增的问题产生影响。规模回报是现代经济分析和增长前景的核心。 这项研究包括一系列使用两种不同证据的专利重要性测试：一种是从各种技术型行业中抽取的国家证据，使用以前收集的证据和原始数据;另一种是重叠的，主要是区域性的证据，收集原始的，在我们看来，更深入的证据。为了评估专利对生产力和盈利能力的重要性，以前收集的证据借鉴了专利重要性的公认衡量标准，如引用次数、引用企业规模和索赔数量。原始证据包括一组重叠的公司来验证结果，通过收集公司对该公司进展的重要专利的评估来交叉检查国家样本。这些衡量标准与国家抽样中使用的衡量标准相比较，包括对公司共同子抽样的测试。区域样本将包括大学和政府实验室，从而能够评估这些非营利实体对公司生产率的重要性以及其他公司进行的研发的重要性。

Decision makers whose work it is to allocate resources to industrial R&D and academic research have a vital interest in measuring the importance of patents. If for example, the patents of today were fewer but better than the patent of yesterday, then the observed decline in the rate of patenting would signify little for the future of technical change and economic growth. This research sets out (1) to measure the significance of patents in order to better gauge their quality, and (2) to supplement the evidence on importance with better information on networks of technology, including any limitations imposed by localization phenomena that inhibit these flows. By carrying out tests that provides (3) better evidence than before to bear on issues of increasing returns to scale at the firm, regional, and national levels. These matters of the returns to scale are central to modern economic analysis and to prospects for growth. The research includes a series of tests of importance of patents using two distinct cuts of the evidence: a national cut drawn from a variety of technology-based industries that uses previously collected evidence and original data; and an overlapping, largely regional cut that will collect original, and, in our view, deeper evidence. The previously collected evidence draws on received measures of the importance of patents such as citations, size of citing firm, and number of claims, in order to assess the importance of patents for productivity and profitability. The original, evidence, which includes an overlapping set of firms to verify the results, cross-checks the national sample by collecting the firms evaluations of significant patents for progress of that firm. These measures compare to the measures used in the national sample, including tests on a common subsample of firms. The regional sample will include universities and government labs, enabling an (5) assessment of the importance of these nonprofit entities to the firm's productivity with the importance of R&D conducted by other firms.