This Science and Society Dissertation Improvement Grant investigates the social production of patents, arguing that patents do not have an unambiguous objective meaning. They do not point referentially to inventions, but are rather social artifacts that people and organizations create and then employ to help them negotiate competitive and legal environments. The project focuses on why individuals and organizations pursue the costly protection of intellectual property and identifies the process by which actors (researchers, intellectual property managers, business development managers, patent attorneys, patent agents, patent searchers, patent examiners and litigators) transform technologies into patent claims and how they use knowledge and information to negotiate and lodge their claims. It also examines how competitive and legal environments shape individual and organizational action. Unlike most researchers who have studied patents, the project focuses on how people and organizations produce patents with the aim of developing a more realistic and grounded theory of a patent's status as an artifact. The project uses a two pronged methodology. First, the researcher will interview representatives of the entire range of occupations (and roles) involved in patenting. Secondly, she will complement the interviews with a field study of an out-licensing intellectual property office at anon-profit R&D organization. Data from the field study will include interviews with inventors and office personnel, observations of meetings, file wrappers and the construction of invention histories. NSF funds will support the data collection. Many researchers have used patents to explore the economics of innovation. Economists have turned to patents as an indicator of economic growth and innovation as well as the knowledge economy (Griliches, 1981). Scholars of organizational strategy regard patents as assets or resources that underwrite differences in firm performance (Wernerfelt, 1984). All of these streams of research rest on a fundamental assumption: that patents are valid indicators of a firm's technological output, performance, knowledge and relationships. But, because researchers have yet to study either the work of occupations that produce patents or the process by which claims are constructed, there is little empirical evidence to warrant treating patents as unambiguous indicators of such concepts. Because this study proposes to study explicitly how patents are produced, its findings will have the potential to reframe how scholars conceptualize patents and the role patents play in both organizations and knowledge economies. A number of disciplines should find the study relevant, including the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of law, technology studies, organization studies, industrial engineering, and business management. The aim is to align social scientific and economic conceptions of patents more closely to legal conceptions of a patent's status. Domestic policy makers and business developers have shown keen interest in supporting the knowledge economy by fostering innovations across regions of the United States (Porter, 2000; Storper, 1997). Other countries would like to learn how to duplicate America's innovation engine. By examining the ecosystem of actors involved in patenting and the complex relationships that exist among those actors, the study will provide more concrete and, hence, practical insight into how such communities produce intellectual property. The proposal will also facilitate NSF's goal of increasing diversity in science because the doctoral student whose work the grant will support is an Asian American woman who intends to enter academia in an area where Asian women are underrepresented.
