EAGER: Measuring American Corporate Science

几年前，《经济学人》杂志为企业实验室写了一篇悼词。它是整个科学基础设施的重要组成部分，也是导致诺贝尔奖的行业科学发现的重要来源，以及维持现有业务或开辟全新市场的突破性创新。现在，大型企业实验室要么已经消失，要么已经不复存在，其影响尚不清楚。一些人声称创新本身已经改变，比以前更少地借鉴科学。其他人则指出施乐帕洛阿尔托研究中心，它的科学进步确实开辟了新的市场，尽管不是施乐。该项目提供了关于这些趋势的经验证据，并通过一个易于使用的在线平台公开提供这些证据。使用该平台，人们可以快速看到公司通过在科学期刊上发表而进入公共领域的新知识，以及公司在开发专利时利用公共科学知识库的程度。该项目更广泛的价值在于它有可能告知公众和政策制定者公共科学如何投入发明活动。虽然系统的专利数据现在已经广泛使用，并用于比较企业的创新活动，但出版物数据，特别是专利中引用的出版物，还没有大规模使用。该项目将400万项专利与1980年至2006年发表的约2000万篇科学文章联系起来。这些是匹配约4000研发性能上市的美国公司。因此，一个企业可以根据其对科学的贡献和对科学的利用来加以描述。通过一个可搜索的在线平台向公众提供这一信息，以便人们可以创建按行业和公司规模分列的科学贡献和使用情况的综合衡量标准。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一级的数据。这些信息将对政策制定者、行业从业者、学者以及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.