Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy: Industries in Focus

摘要

Innovation-the process through which new ideas are generated and successfully introduced in the marketplace-is a primary driver of U.S. economic growth and national competitiveness. Likewise, U.S. companies' use of trademarks to distinguish their goods and services from those of competitors represents an additional support for innovation, enabling firms to capture market share, which contributes to growth in our economy. The granting and protection of intellectual property (IP) rights is vital to promoting innovation and creativity and is an essential element of our free-enterprise, market-based system. Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are the principal means used to establish ownership of inventions and creative ideas in their various forms, providing a legal foundation to generate tangible benefits from innovation for companies, workers, and consumers. Without this framework, the creators of intellectual property would tend to lose the economic fruits of their own work, thereby undermining the incentives to undertake the investments necessary to develop the IP in the first place. Moreover, without IP protection, the inventor who had invested time and money in developing the new product or service (sunk costs) would always be at a disadvantage to the new firm that could just copy and market the product without having to recoup any sunk costs or pay the higher salaries required by those with the creative talents and skills. As a result, the benefits associated with American ingenuity would tend to more easily flow outside of the United States. IP is used everywhere in the economy, and IP rights support innovation and creativity in virtually every U.S. industry. While IP rights play a large role in generating economic growth, little attention has been given to identifying which industries produce or use significant amounts of IP and rely most intensively on these rights. This report begins such an investigation by developing several industry-level metrics on IP use and employing these measures to identify a set of the most IP-intensive industries in the U.S. economy. To develop the industry-level metrics discussed, several databases were used, some of which (for the patent and trademark analyses) are publicly available.3 In the future, more user-friendly sets of these patent and trademark data will be made available on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website.