Patenting and it's Impact on Innovation

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With support from the National Science Foundation's Innovation and Organizational Change Program, this research focuses on the impact of patents on the generation and use of innovation. It seeks to provide an empirical basis on which to address questions of patent policy. The project will study a series of related questions. First, what factors influence the patenting behavior of firms? Second, what is the effect of patenting on the incentives to conduct R&D at firm and industry levels? Patents not only confer protection, but through disclosure also make public information that, while diminishing protection, may contribute to the R&D of rivals. Finally, the work will consider how and why firms' intellectual property strategies have changed over the past two decades.The researchers will develop three models. A firm-level model will explore the impact of patenting strength on both R&D and patenting decisions. An industry-level simultaneous equation model will address the role of patents in affecting industry-level R&D spending and information flows. A firm-level model will address determinants of licensing. Interview-based field studies will provide robust qualitative testing of the quantitative models' results, as well as suggesting further insights. Quantitative models will make use of existing data sets, the Carnegie Mellon Survey on Industrial R&D, a "sister" survey of R&D in Japan conducted by the National Institute for Science and Technology Policy, and Securities Data Corporation's database of licensing agreements and other "knowledge transactions." The project is being conducted in close cooperation with the Science and Technology Policy Board of the National Research Council.Patenting, licensing and other agreements affecting the protection and sharing of intellectual property clearly relate to innovation activities broadly construed. The work promises a thoughtful empirical exploration of patents and their effects on how organizations address research and innovation, while offering informative comparisons between practices and impacts in the United States and Japan.