Dissertation Research: Social Production Of Patents As Legal Resources

这篇科学与社会学位论文改进拨款调查了专利的社会生产，认为专利并没有明确的客观含义。它们不是指发明，而是人们和组织创造的社会产物，然后用来帮助他们谈判竞争和法律环境。该项目侧重于为什么个人和组织追求代价高昂的知识产权保护，并确定行为者(研究人员、知识产权管理人员、业务发展管理人员、专利律师、专利代理人、专利搜索员、专利审查员和诉讼律师)将技术转化为专利权利要求的过程，以及他们如何利用知识和信息谈判和提出权利要求。它还考察了竞争和法律环境如何塑造个人和组织的行动。与大多数研究专利的研究人员不同，该项目关注的是个人和组织如何生产专利，目的是开发一种更现实、更扎实的专利地位理论。该项目采用了双管齐下的方法。首先，研究人员将采访专利涉及的所有职业(和角色)的代表。其次，她还将对一家非营利性研发机构的对外授权知识产权办公室进行实地考察，作为采访的补充。实地研究的数据将包括对发明人和办公室人员的访谈、对会议的观察、文件包装和发明历史的构建。NSF基金将支持数据收集。许多研究人员利用专利来探索创新的经济学。经济学家已将专利作为经济增长和创新以及知识经济的指标(Griliches，1981)。组织战略学者认为专利是影响企业绩效差异的资产或资源(WernerFeet，1984)。所有这些研究都建立在一个基本假设之上：专利是公司技术产出、业绩、知识和关系的有效指标。但是，由于研究人员尚未研究产生专利的职业的工作或权利主张的构建过程，几乎没有经验证据证明有必要将专利视为此类概念的明确指标。由于这项研究建议明确研究专利是如何产生的，其发现将有可能重新构建学者们对专利的概念以及专利在组织和知识经济中所扮演的角色。一些学科应该发现这项研究是相关的，包括知识社会学、法律社会学、技术研究、组织研究、工业工程和企业管理。其目的是使专利的社会、科学和经济概念与专利地位的法律概念更加紧密地联系在一起。国内政策制定者和商业开发人员对通过促进美国各地区的创新来支持知识经济表现出了浓厚的兴趣(Porter，2000；Storper，1997)。其他国家也想学习如何复制美国的创新引擎。通过考察参与专利申请的行为者的生态系统以及这些行为者之间存在的复杂关系，这项研究将为此类社区如何产生知识产权提供更具体、更实际的洞察。这项提案还将促进NSF增加科学多样性的目标，因为这笔拨款将支持其工作的博士生是一名亚裔美国女性，她打算进入一个亚洲女性比例较低的领域的学术界。

This Science and Society Dissertation Improvement Grant investigates the social production of patents, arguing that patents do not have an unambiguous objective meaning. They do not point referentially to inventions, but are rather social artifacts that people and organizations create and then employ to help them negotiate competitive and legal environments. The project focuses on why individuals and organizations pursue the costly protection of intellectual property and identifies the process by which actors (researchers, intellectual property managers, business development managers, patent attorneys, patent agents, patent searchers, patent examiners and litigators) transform technologies into patent claims and how they use knowledge and information to negotiate and lodge their claims. It also examines how competitive and legal environments shape individual and organizational action. Unlike most researchers who have studied patents, the project focuses on how people and organizations produce patents with the aim of developing a more realistic and grounded theory of a patent's status as an artifact. The project uses a two pronged methodology. First, the researcher will interview representatives of the entire range of occupations (and roles) involved in patenting. Secondly, she will complement the interviews with a field study of an out-licensing intellectual property office at anon-profit R&D organization. Data from the field study will include interviews with inventors and office personnel, observations of meetings, file wrappers and the construction of invention histories. NSF funds will support the data collection. Many researchers have used patents to explore the economics of innovation. Economists have turned to patents as an indicator of economic growth and innovationas well as the knowledge economy (Griliches, 1981). Scholars of organizational strategy regard patents as assets or resources that underwrite differences in firm performance (Wernerfelt, 1984). All of these streams of research rest on a fundamental assumption: that patents are valid indicators of a firm's technological output, performance, knowledge and relationships. But, because researchers have yet to study either the work of occupations that produce patents or the process by which claims are constructed, there is little empirical evidence to warrant treating patents as unambiguous indicators of such concepts. Because this study proposes to study explicitly how patents are produced, its findings will have the potential to reframe how scholars conceptualize patents and the role patents play in both organizations and knowledge economies. A number of disciplines should find the study relevant, including the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of law, technology studies, organization studies, industrial engineering, and business management. The aim is to align social scientific and economic conceptions of patents more closely to legal conceptions of a patent's status. Domestic policy makers and business developers have shown keen interest in supporting the knowledge economy by fostering innovations across regions of the United States (Porter, 2000; Storper, 1997). Other countries would like to learn how to duplicate America's innovation engine. By examining the ecosystem of actors involved in patenting and the complex relationships that exist among those actors, the study will provide more concrete and, hence, practical insight into how such communities produce intellectual property. The proposal will also facilitate NSF's goal of increasing diversity in science because the doctoral student whose work the grant will support is an Asian American woman who intends to enter academia in an area where Asian women are underrepresented.