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Helpful comments from Sam Kortum (including the suggestion to describe the "control" patent in the survey as a "placebo") are gratefully acknowledged. Financial support was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, via the Project on Industrial Technology and Productivity at the NBER. The views expressed, and responsibility for all errors, lie with the authors.

Federal lab commercialization is explored: (1) by analyzing US government patents and (2) in a qualitative analysis of one NASA lab’s patents. Tests apply to three distinct sets of patents, 1963–94: NASA, all other US government, and a random sample of all US inventors’ patents. The federal patenting rate plummeted in the 1970s. Consistent with increasing commercialization, both NASA’s and other federal agencies’ rates recovered in the 1980s. The case study finds citations to be a valid but noisy measure of technology spillovers. Excluding ‘spurious’ cites, two‐thirds of cites to patents of NASA‐Lewis’ Electro‐Physics Branch were evaluated as involving spillovers.

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