A survey of recent patentees was conducted to elicit their perceptions regarding the importance of their inventions, the extent of their communication with other inventors, and the relationship of both importance and communication to observed patent citations. A cohort of 1993 patentees were...

We explore the commercialization of government-generated technology by analyzing patents awarded to the U.S. government and the citations to those patents from subsequent patents. We use information on citations to federal patents in two ways: (1) to compare the average technological impact of...

We compare the geographic location of patent citations to those of the cited patents, as evidence of the extent to which knowledge spillovers are geographically localized. We find that citations to U.S. patents are more likely to come from the U.S., and more likely to come from the same state...

We explore the use of patent citations to measure the "basicness" and appropriability of inventions. We propose that the basicness of research underlying an invention can be characterized by the nature of the previous patents cited by an invention; that the basicness of research outcomes relates...

This paper explores changes in university patenting behavior between 1965 and 1988. We show that university patents have increased 15-fold while real university research spending almost tripled. The causes of this increase are unclear, but may include increased focus on commercially relevant...

We explore the usefulness of patent citations as a measure of the "importance" of a firm's patents, as indicated by the stock market valuation of the firm's intangible stock of knowledge. Using patents and citations for 1963--1995, we estimate Tobin's q equations on the ratios of R&D to assets...

This paper describes the database on U.S. patents that we have developed over the past decade, with the goal of making it widely accessible for research. We present main trends in U. S. patenting over the last 30 years, including a variety of original measures constructed with citation data,...

The extent to which new technological knowledge flows across institutional and national boundaries is a question of great importance for public policy and the modeling of economic growth. This paper develops a model of the process generating subsequent citations to patents as a lens for viewing...