EAGER: Measuring American Corporate Science

几年前，《经济学人》杂志为公司实验室写了一篇悼词。是整个科学基础设施的重要组成部分，也是行业科学发现的重要来源，这些发现导致诺贝尔奖以及支持现有业务或开拓全新市场的突破性创新。现在，大型企业实验室要么已不复存在，要么已成为昔日的影子，其影响尚不可知。一些人声称，创新本身已经发生了变化，对科学的依赖比以前少了。其他人则提到施乐帕洛阿尔托研究中心，该公司的科学进步确实为施乐打开了新的市场，尽管不是为施乐。该项目为这些趋势提供了经验证据，并通过一个易于使用的在线平台将其公之于众。使用该平台，人们可以迅速看到一家公司通过在科学期刊上发表而进入公共领域的新知识，以及一家公司在开发其专利时在多大程度上利用了公共科学知识池。该项目更广泛的价值在于它有可能让公众和政策制定者了解公共科学是如何融入创造性活动的。虽然系统的专利数据现已广泛可用，并用于比较公司的创新活动，但出版物数据，特别是专利中引用的出版物尚未大规模提供。该项目将400万项专利与1980年至2006年发表的约2000万篇科学论文联系起来。这与大约4000家美国上市公司的研发业绩相当。因此，一家公司可以用他们对科学的贡献和对科学的使用来描述。这些信息通过一个可搜索的在线平台向公众提供，这样人们就可以按行业和公司规模创建科学贡献和使用的综合衡量标准。该项目通过一个易于使用的在线平台，向广大公众提供公司级别的数据。这些信息将对政策制定者、行业从业者、学者和任何对科学和创新感兴趣的人有用。

Some years ago, the Economist magazine wrote a eulogy for the corporate lab. An important part of the overall scientific infrastructure, and a vital source of scientific discoveries in industries that lead to Nobel prizes as well as breakthrough innovations that sustain existing businesses or open up altogether new markets. Now the big corporate laboratories are either gone or a shadow of what they once were and the implications are unknown. Some claim innovation itself has changed, drawing less on science than before. Others point to Xerox PARC, whose scientific advances did open up new markets, albeit not for Xerox. This project provides empirical evidence on these trends and makes them publicly available through an easy-to-use online platform. Using the platform one can quickly see the new knowledge a corporation puts into the public domain by publishing in scientific journals, as well as how much a corporation draws upon the public pool of scientific knowledge in developing its patents. The broader value of the project lies in its potential to inform the public and policy makers on how public science feeds into inventive activity. Whereas systematic patent data are now widely available and used to compare innovation activities by firms, publication data, and specifically, publications cited in patents have not been available on a large scale.The project links 4 million patents to about 20 million scientific articles published between 1980 and 2006. These are matched to about 4000 R&D performing publicly traded American corporations. Thus, a firm can be characterized in terms of their contribution to science and their use of science. This information is made available to the public through a searchable online platform, so that one can create synthetic measures of contribution and usage of science by industry and firm size. This project makes the firm level data available, to the broad public at large, through an easy-to-use online platform. The information will be useful to policy makers, industry practitioners, scholars, and anyone interested in science and innovation.