Working Paper: NBER ID: w31460
Authors: Serguey Braguinsky; Joonkyu Choi; Yuheng Ding; Karam Jo; Seula Kim
Abstract: We use the U.S. patent data merged with firm-level datasets to establish new facts about the role of mega firms in generating “novel patents”—innovations that introduce new combinations of technology components for the first time. While the importance of mega firms in novel patents had been declining until about 2000, it has strongly rebounded since then. The timing of this turnaround coincided with the ascendance of firms that newly became mega firms in the 2000s, and a shift in the technological contents, characterized by increasing integration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and non-ICT components. Mega firms also generate a disproportionately large number of “hits”—novel patents that lead to the largest numbers of follow-on patents (subsequent patents that use the same combinations of technology components as the first novel patent)—and their hits tend to generate more follow-on patents assigned to other firms when compared to hits generated by non-mega firms. Overall, our findings suggest that mega firms play an increasingly important role in generating new technological trajectories in recent years, especially in combining ICT with non-ICT components.
Keywords: innovation; mega firms; patent data; ICT; knowledge diffusion
JEL Codes: L10; O30; O32; O33
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| mega firms (L10) | novel patent applications (O34) |
| novel patent applications (O34) | follow-on patents (O34) |
| mega firms (L10) | hits (novel patents that lead to follow-on patents) (O36) |
| hits (Y60) | follow-on patents assigned to other firms (L24) |