Sources of Biological Innovation for Agriculture: the Roles of Public and Private Research Institutions in Generating Technological Trajectories

This paper introduces a comprehensive data set of patents issued in the U.S. between 1975 and 1998 in the biological sciences applied to plant agriculture. Novel sampling techniques are employed along with a multinomial econometric model to analyze the differences in patenting across the R&D sectors of the economy. Hypotheses are presented that universities and public institutions specialize in basic research and patent research results with the greatest uncertainty in terms of the value of the outcomes; entrepreneurial private innovators such as startup companies and individual inventors specialize in turning basic innovations into applied innovations and marketing these for industrial use, and undertake research of somewhat more certain value; corporations specialize in incremental applied innovations that concentrate on the production of final outputs, not on enabling further innovation, and patent with greatest certainty of the value of outcomes. Analysis of the distributions of adjusted forward patent citations, an established proxy for patent value, reveals significant differences between university, startup, and corporate inventors in terms of the mean values and the level of uncertainty of values their respective patented inventions, with universities and public research organizations achieving the highest mean value and highest variance of values, startups with an intermediate mean and variance of value, and corporations with the smallest mean variance of value. Discrete outcome estimation results are preliminary, but appear to support the hypothesis of universities undertaking early research in the evolution of technologies, followed by startups, with corporations concentrating in later developments.