EAGER: Measuring American Corporate Science

National Bureau Of Economic Research Inc, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Some years ago, the Economist magazine wrote a eulogy for the corporate lab. An important part of the overall scientific infrastructure, and a vital source of scientific discoveries in industries that lead to Nobel prizes as well as breakthrough innovations that sustain existing businesses or open up altogether new markets. Now the big corporate laboratories are either gone or a shadow of what they once were and the implications are unknown. Some claim innovation itself has changed, drawing less on science than before. Others point to Xerox PARC, whose scientific advances did open up new markets, albeit not for Xerox. This project provides empirical evidence on these trends and makes them publicly available through an easy-to-use online platform. Using the platform one can quickly see the new knowledge a corporation puts into the public domain by publishing in scientific journals, as well as how much a corporation draws upon the public pool of scientific knowledge in developing its patents. The broader value of the project lies in its potential to inform the public and policy makers on how public science feeds into inventive activity. Whereas systematic patent data are now widely available and used to compare innovation activities by firms, publication data, and specifically, publications cited in patents have not been available on a large scale. The project links 4 million patents to about 20 million scientific articles published between 1980 and 2006. These are matched to about 4000 R&D performing publicly traded American corporations. Thus, a firm can be characterized in terms of their contribution to science and their use of science. This information is made available to the public through a searchable online platform, so that one can create synthetic measures of contribution and usage of science by industry and firm size. This project makes the firm level data available, to the broad public at large, through an easy-to-use online platform. The information will be useful to policy makers, industry practitioners, scholars, and anyone interested in science and innovation.