EAGER: IPRoduct: A Database of Linked Products-intellectual Property Rights

National Bureau Of Economic Research Inc, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The project will link innovative goods sold in the U.S. economy to the patents upon which they are based. By directly linking patents to products, this project tracks innovation to the point where it meets consumers, the true commercial end point of investments in science. This project provides a new tool for demonstrating in a more systematic manner the breadth of science, the role of federal funding, and their combined impact on everyday life. The project generates a better understanding of how intellectual property impacts the economy, as well as provide a means of estimating the magnitude of that impact. The output of the project is a pilot database of linked patent-product pairs that will be made publicly available. The production of such a database has never been attempted on such a large scale before, yet promises to greatly improve our understanding of innovation. The construction of the database exploits the virtual patent marking (VPM) statute introduced in the 2011 Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. Under that act, patentees may give notice to the public that their product is patented. The project creates software that is able to identify VPM sections of websites and to parse the product-patent links to populate the database. A second task involves enriching the base data by connecting patents to the PATSTAT worldwide patent database and to Thomson Reuters? Web of Science database through cited prior art in the patent documents. The project will augment the base data with information on firms, trademark and product price and to identify patent documents mention the government interest statements, which indicate that an invention is the result of federal funding. These data provide the basis for other studies on the real impact of science and intellectual property policy.