Ideas, Inventions, and Regions

将资源分配给工业研发和学术研究的决策者，在衡量专利的重要性方面有着至关重要的利益。例如，如果今天的专利比昨天的更少但更好，那么观察到的专利拥有率的下降对未来的技术变革和经济增长意义不大。这项研究提出(1)衡量专利的重要性，以便更好地衡量其质量，(2)用关于技术网络的更好的信息来补充关于重要性的证据，包括抑制这些流动的本地化现象施加的任何限制。通过进行测试，提供(3)比以前更好的证据，在公司、地区和国家层面上增加回报。这些规模回报问题是现代经济分析和增长前景的核心。这项研究包括使用两种截然不同的证据对专利的重要性进行一系列测试：一种是来自各种基于技术的行业的全国性切分，使用之前收集的证据和原始数据；另一种是重叠的、主要是地区性的切分，它将收集原始的、在我们看来更深层次的证据。以前收集的证据利用了所收到的专利重要性的衡量标准，如引文、引用公司的规模和索赔数量，以评估专利对生产力和盈利的重要性。原始的证据，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核对全国样本。这些措施与国家样本中使用的措施进行了比较，包括对常见的公司子样本的测试。该地区的样本将包括大学和政府实验室，从而能够评估这些非营利性实体对公司生产率的重要性，以及其他公司进行研发的重要性。

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.