Doctoral Dissertation Research: Uses and non-uses of patented inventions

创新是国家和行业竞争力的关键要素，建设创新能力是政策制定者和企业议程的核心。然而，尽管这种政策的重点主要是鼓励发明(产生新想法)，但创新(将这些想法付诸实践)是经济增长的关键一步。大多数创新研究都将发明视为创新的代理衡量标准，因此只以支离破碎和不完整的方式来研究创新。本论文由科学、技术和社会计划资助，目的是考察发明与多种因素的使用，这些因素可以由公共政策或参与创新过程的实体来管理。特别是，这项研究旨在研究影响专利发明商业用途选择的因素和条件，包括内部使用(新的或改进的产品或工艺)、许可和组建初创公司。此外，这项研究建立在早期关于专利战略使用的工作的基础上，以探索专利的其他“非使用”，例如提供操作自由，或提供对竞争对手技术的获取。以这些非传统方式日益普遍地使用专利加速了企业之间的专利竞赛，并引发了关于现行专利制度是否适合促进科技进步和促进创新的政策辩论。这项研究的关键问题是绘制不同专利利用模式的流行度，并考察专利实力、互补资产、企业规模、知识来源和合作对专利使用和非使用模式选择的影响。本研究使用从1900多名发明者调查中构建的大规模、多层次和跨行业的数据，并辅之以专利文件和公司和行业数据库，检验了这一重要问题。此次发明家调查是自1994年卡内基梅隆调查以来，美国唯一一次大规模的发明创新调查。

Innovation is a vital element for national and industrial competitiveness and building up innovation capabilities is central to the agenda of policy makers and firms. However, while much of this policy focus has been on encouraging invention (generating new ideas), innovation (putting those ideas into practice) is the critical step for economic growth. Most innovation research has regarded invention as a proxy measure of innovation and, as a result, addressed innovation only in a fragmented and incomplete way.The objective of this dissertation funded by the Science, Technology, and Society Program is to examine the uses of inventions in relation to multiple factors that can be managed by public policy or by entities participating in the innovation process. In particular, this study aims to examine the factors and conditions that affect the choice of commercial uses of patented inventions, including internal use (new or improved product or process), licensing, and forming a start-up firm. Furthermore, this study builds on earlier work on the strategic uses of patents to explore other "non-uses" of patents, such as to provide freedom to operate, or to provide access to rivals' technologies. The increasingly pervasive uses of patents in these non-traditional ways have accelerated patent races among firms and ignited policy debates about whether the current patent system is suitable for promoting the progress of science and technology and contributing to innovation. The key questions of this study are to map the prevalence of different modes of exploiting patents and to examine the impacts of the strength of patents, complementary assets, firm size, knowledge sources and collaboration on the mode choice of patent uses and non-uses.This study examines this important question using large-scale, multi-level and cross-industry data constructed from a survey of over 1900 inventors, supplemented with data from patent documents, and firm and industry databases. This inventor survey is the only large-scale survey of invention and innovation in the United States since the Carnegie Mellon survey of 1994.