Innovation is a vital element for national and industrial competitiveness and building up innovation capabilities is central to the agenda of policy makers and firms. However, while much of this policy focus has been on encouraging invention (generating new ideas), innovation (putting those ideas into practice) is the critical step for economic growth. Most innovation research has regarded invention as a proxy measure of innovation and, as a result, addressed innovation only in a fragmented and incomplete way.
The objective of this dissertation funded by the Science, Technology, and Society Program is to examine the uses of inventions in relation to multiple factors that can be managed by public policy or by entities participating in the innovation process. In particular, this study aims to examine the factors and conditions that affect the choice of commercial uses of patented inventions, including internal use (new or improved product or process), licensing, and forming a start-up firm. Furthermore, this study builds on earlier work on the strategic uses of patents to explore other "non-uses" of patents, such as to provide freedom to operate, or to provide access to rivals' technologies. The increasingly pervasive uses of patents in these non-traditional ways have accelerated patent races among firms and ignited policy debates about whether the current patent system is suitable for promoting the progress of science and technology and contributing to innovation. The key questions of this study are to map the prevalence of different modes of exploiting patents and to examine the impacts of the strength of patents, complementary assets, firm size, knowledge sources and collaboration on the mode choice of patent uses and non-uses.
This study examines this important question using large-scale, multi-level and cross-industry data constructed from a survey of over 1900 inventors, supplemented with data from patent documents, and firm and industry databases. This inventor survey is the only large-scale survey of invention and innovation in the United States since the Carnegie Mellon survey of 1994.
