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

长期以来，人们普遍认为，对研究的投资极大地促进了技术进步，最终提高了经济生产率和生活水平。不幸的是，支持这些论点的系统和定量证据仍然很少，而且生产成本高昂。该项目生成并公开所有承认政府支持的专利的详细观察结果。更具体地说，它计算了截至2015年的专利获批比例，这些专利直接或间接依赖政府投资。这项研究为政府资助的研究如何影响技术变革提供了更清晰的图景。使用先进的数据技术，主要是自然语言处理和机器学习，该项目识别出自1976年以来包含政府支持承认的每一项美国专利。实时可视化工具将支持自1976年以来的任何美国专利的过去和未来的引用网络。总而言之，这项工作衡量并说明了今天S的国内外专利技术在多大程度上可以追溯到(无论是直接或间接的)美国纳税人的投资。该项目调查了自1976年以来政府支持的专利总数及其特点，以确定政府支持对后续发明的影响，相对于类似的私营部门技术。根据发明家的特点，该项目将能够检查政府支持的发明家的职业道路，并估计美国政府对外国发明家的支持。该项目衡量了这种支持对技术轨迹和知识传播的影响？外国人才从哪里流失？美国政府投资。它在任何用户指定的专利的向后和向前引文网络的动态呈现中说明了这些结果。这些易于交流和图文并茂的研究结果促进了关于科学和技术研究资金的更有见地的讨论和辩论。

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.