Patent Data Project - NSF Proposal

Brief Literature Review A very large number of research papers and doctoral dissertations have already been produced using the previous patent database constructed by Hall, Jaffe, and Trajtenberg (2001), in a number of disciplines including economics, management, law, and sociology. The appendix lists the papers and projects that we are aware of via author communication and/or citation on the Web of Science (ISI) and Google Scholar; there are likely to be more users that we do not know about, since the data is freely available in at least two places and registration is not required to use it. It is also likely that more of the research done with these data has been published than is indicated on the table, because researchers tend to get in touch with us early in the project. Of the approximately 100 projects of which we are aware, about 40 are thesis projects, mostly doctoral dissertations. One quarter are conducted by researchers outside the United States. In this section of the proposal we give a brief overview of the questions analyzed by these papers and some of the creative uses to which the data have been put. We emphasize the areas where enhancing the data along the lines we suggest will enable researchers to push beyond the large body of work that has already been accomplished. The reason for all this interest in our data is easy to explain. The growth in importance of the knowledge economy worldwide has lead to an increased interest in methods of measuring knowledge accumulation and knowledge flow on the part of researchers in a number of disciplines. Given the intangible nature of knowledge and information, few readily quantifiable measures of these concepts exist. As was noted long ago by such pioneers in the field as Griliches (1990 survey), Scherer (1965), and Schmookler (1966), patent data can be used to construct such measures. The primary advantage of patent data are that they are available over a wide range of countries and years, for detailed technology classes, and they contain information on inventor, geographic area, and owner (if there is one other than the inventor). Together, these data provide information on the locus and type of newly created knowledge. The second advantage is that they provide information on links between different quanta of knowledge via the citations to other patents and non-patent documents that they contain (see Jaffe, Trajtenberg, and Fogarty …