Flows of knowledge from universities and federal laboratories: Modeling the flow of patent citations over time and across institutional and geographic boundaries

摘要

The extent to which new technological knowl- edge flows across institutional and national boundaries is a question of great importance for public policy and the mod- eling of economic growth. In this paper we develop a model of the process generating subsequent citations to patents as a lens for viewing knowledge diffusion. We find that the prob- ability of patent citation over time after a patent is granted fits well to a double-exponential function that can be interpreted as the mixture of diffusion and obsolescense functions. The results indicate that diffusion is geographically localized. Controlling for other factors, within-country citations are more numerous and come more quickly than those that cross country boundaries.