On the origins of the worldwide surge in patenting: an industry perspective on the R&D-patent relationship

Do new CEOs really care about innovation?

“…To account for the truncation bias in citations, we adjust the citations received by each patent by the average citations in the same cohort (year and industry class) following Hall et al (2005). Fourth, we use R&D/Invention Patents as our final measure of corporate innovation (Danguy et al, 2014; de Rassenfosse & van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, 2009) to show innovation efficiency. The use of a comprehensive set of innovation proxies allows us to examine the impact of CEO turnover on the entire innovation process: from input (R&D spending) to output (patent application counts) and the subsequent impact of the innovation (citations).…”

Measuring Innovation Quality: A Patent Analysis

“…In the U.S.A, one of the most critical events in this industry occurred in 1984 when the monopolist AT&T was subdivided into several companies allowing the rise of firms like Time Warner, Hughes Electronics, and Qualcomm Wireless. According to [21], the communications industry is one of the industries in which innovation is fundamental to the firms' survival, and firms have myriad of patents. Also, [22] and [23] showed that semiconductor firms have a high-density patenting activity.…”

“…Patent analysis is a widespread method used to transform patent information into in-depth insights on firm innovation performance [25]. The innovation literature has pointed out the significant correlation between R&D input and inventive performance, highlighting the relationship between the R&D expenditure and the number of patents produced [21] and [26]. In particular, [27] showed that product innovations are likely to be protected by patents while process innovations often are protected by secrecy.…”

“…To better understand these dynamics, this study examines 155 firms operating in the U.S. communications industry. This context was chosen because innovation in this industry is essential for firms to compete successfully and gain a competitive advantage [21], the high-density of the patenting activity [22], [23], and the usefulness of patent analysis if applied to this industry [24]. Innovation quality measures, namely, technological impact, the invention's originality, and generality have been calculated.…”

Patent citation data in social science research: Overview and best practices

“…A broader question, which has received little coverage in the literature, relates to differences in patenting and citation practices across technology fields. We know that the propensity to patent differs across fields (Cohen, Nelson, & Walsh, 2000) and that the relevance of patent data as innovation indicator therefore also varies across fields (e.g., Danguy, de Rassenfosse, & van Pottelsberghe, 2014). However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has investigated in a systematic manner how differences across fields affect the relevance of patent citation data.…”