Working Paper: NBER ID: w10901
Authors: Bronwyn H. Hall; Manuel Trajtenberg
Abstract: This paper asks the question: Can we see evidence of General Purpose Technologies in patent data? Using data on three million US patents granted between 1967 and 1999, and their citations received between 1975 and 2002, we construct a number of measures of GPTs, including generality, number of citations, and patent class growth, for patents themselves and for the patents that cite the patents. A selection of the top twenty patents in the tails of the distribution of several of these measures yields a set of mostly ICT technologies, of which the most important are those underlying transactions on the internet and object-oriented software. We conclude with a brief discussion of the problems we encountered in developing our measures and suggestions for future work in this area.
Keywords: General Purpose Technologies; Patent Data; Innovation
JEL Codes: O330; O310; L860
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| citation patterns of patents (O34) | existence of general purpose technologies (GPTs) (O30) |
| growth of patents citing a GPT (O38) | diffusion and development of that technology (O33) |
| citation lags for GPT-related patents (O34) | time for benefits to manifest (C41) |