The effects of inventor mobility, inventive team characteristics, and the patent examination process on patent values.

摘要

I empirically test three hypotheses regarding the determinants of the economic value of innovation: (1) the mobility behavior of individual inventors influences value differently depending on inventors' types, (2) the choices that firms' R&D managers make in forming inventive teams matter, and (3) government has a significant effect on the private value of innovation through the patent examination process. I use five datasets based on United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) data, the largest sections of which were prepared by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)'s patent data project. I extend and enhance the NBER's data by (1) including data through 2010, (2) creating new variables, (3) solving "names game" problems for inventors and examiners, and (4) adding Public Application Information Retrieval data directly from the USPTO website. My data include five million patents for more than two million different inventors over the period from 1976 to 2010.;I find that the division of all inventors into four groups based on the quality and quantity of their patents is important in determining how mobility influences the value of innovation. I also show, using US and German inventors, that there are international differences in the way an inventor's mobility affects the value of patents. As for team characteristics, I find that teams with higher average ages of inventors and teams having more different co-inventors in prior patent applications are associated with lower-quality patents. Finally, I show that examination time is shorter for more experienced examiners and for female examiners, implying that patent value depends on these variables, an unintended consequence of the examination process.