The reach of the visible hand: government acknowledgments in US patents and technological change, 1975-2015

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It has long been received wisdom that investment in research greatly facilitates the technological progress that ultimately improves economic productivity and living standards. Unfortunately, the systematic and quantitative evidence to support these arguments remains thin and expensive to produce. This project generates and makes public detailed observations of all patents that acknowledge government support. More specifically, it calculates the proportion of patents issued through 2015 that have relied, directly or indirectly, upon government investment. This research provides a sharper picture of how government sponsored research impacts technological change. Using advanced data techniques, mainly natural language processing and machine learning, this project identifies every US patent since 1976 that contains an acknowledgment of government support. A real-time visualization tool will enable the past and future citation networks of any U.S. patent since 1976. Taken together, this work measures and illustrates the extent to which today?s patented technology, both domestic and foreign, can be traced (whether directly or indirectly) back to US taxpayer investment. This project investigates the total number of government supported patents since 1976 and their characteristics to discern the impact of government support on subsequent invention, relative to similar private sector technology. Augmented with characteristics of inventors the project will enable examination of the career paths of government supported inventors and estimate US government support going to foreign inventors. The project measures the impact of that support on technological trajectories and the knowledge diffusion of ? and the foreign brain drain from ? US government investment. It illustrates these results in a dynamic rendering of the backward and forward citation network for any user-specified patent. These easily communicated and illustrated findings facilitate more informed discussion and debate regarding science and technology research funding.