Collaborative Research: Public R&D and the Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

The government?s role in sponsoring R&D has been justified because the private sector is likely to underinvest in R&D due to the long horizons of basic research and the difficulties in generating financial returns to basic research outcomes. This project provides valuable insights to understand whether the decline in Federal R&D spending since 2010 hurts U.S. competitiveness. This project leverages a new quantitative measure of long term technological trajectories, patent influence, to determine if public funding of inventive activity supports research that would be eschewed by the private sector. The project investigates the long term implications of changes to federal agency support of research on the likely impact of future scientific and technological breakthroughs. The project?s research strategy presents a solution to the difficult problem of measuring the long term effects of basic research funding on invention and offers policy makers a way to better assess the types of programs that are likely to lead to long term scientific and technological breakthroughs. The public contribution to the knowledge embedded in a patent is measured through the patent?s citations to patents and academic research, its funding sources, and where the invention occurred (i.e., university, a national lab or a private firm). These attributes are then related to patent influence. The use of the influence measure is computationally intensive and only recently feasible given advances in computing technology. This research is the first to provide a comprehensive, quantitative assessment of the long term influence of public support of research and development on technological trajectories, as measured by patents. A pilot study of patents granted and applied for between 2001 and 2004 suggests that while average patents are similar, some types of government funding are more likely to lead to the generation of breakthrough inventions than patents funded by the private sector. The use of quantile regression analysis accommodates the skewed nature of the returns to research and development and allows studying funding effects on breakthrough inventions. The project will calculate both influence and received influence measures for all digitized patents.