Iain Cockburn Bronwyn Hall Walter Powell Manuel Trajtenberg
Patents are uniquely useful public source of information about the creation and dissemination of new knowledge, providing a rich source of data on evolving relationships between economics, technology and social structures. This project builds on previous NSF-supported efforts to build a research-friendly patent database. The initial database enabled a remarkably wide range of research on topics, including innovation, economic growth, science policy, the clustering of economic activity, social networks, and knowledge spillovers, to legal disputes, and the operation of the US patent system. At least 100 significant research projects have used these data, including at least 50 doctoral dissertations, generating more than 96 published articles and working papers. This project will radically upgrade and extend this earlier work to build a freely available large-scale database of information on more than 4 million US patents, covering more than 30 years of technological and economic development. The database will be tailored for research use in a wide range of disciplines and applications, and structured to facilitate linkages to many other sources of information on individuals and organizations.
Broader Impacts
This project will enable a new wave of social science research on technological change, its supporting institutions, and its consequences. By encouraging collaborative "annotation" of the core database, it will also foster development of a community of interested researchers drawn from many disciplines, and promote aggregation and integration of different data sources. More broadly, results from this research will inform public policies towards invention and entrepreneurship, regional economic growth, investment in science and technology, trade and competition in knowledge-intensive industries. They will also support the development of important tools for practical applications such as measuring and forecasting new technologies, valuing intangible assets, and managing business risk.
