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New research on patents from Harvard Business School faculty on issues including patent disclosures and standard setting organizations, patent trolls, and whether patents help startups grow and succeed.
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Financial Distancing: How Venture Capital Follows the Economy Down and Curtails Innovation

by Sabrina T. Howell, Josh Lerner, Ramana Nanda, and Richard Townsend

Common wisdom holds that VC investment and VC-backed startups are relatively insulated from downturns. This study shows that the relative quantity and quality of innovation declines more for VC-backed firms than for other types of firms during downturns.

What We Learned from Reading Jeff Bezos’ Patents

by Tricia Gregg and Boris Groysberg

By studying Jeff Bezos' personal patent records, Tricia Gregg and Boris Groysberg offer a unique glimpse into Amazon's strategy. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Tech Clusters

by William R. Kerr and Frederic Robert-Nicoud

We are witnessing a major transformation of business to achieve strategic positions in powerful tech hubs, but most workers and consumers will always be far away. The authors describe the spatial concentration of tech activity in the United States and explore the economics of tech clusters with an eye to the future of innovation and economic geography.

Do National Security Secrets Hold Back National Innovation?

by Kristen Senz

It's a paradox about innovation. Inventors want to keep secret the inner workings of their most commercial technologies, while technological progress relies on transparency. Daniel Gross looks to the secrets of WW II for insights. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations

by Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury, and Hillel Rapoport

This study provides robust econometric evidence for how immigrant inventors shape the innovation dynamics of their receiving countries. Countries receiving inventors from other nations that specialize in patenting particular technologies are more likely to have a significant increase in patent applications of the same technology.

The Consequences of Invention Secrecy: Evidence from the USPTO Patent Secrecy Program in World War II

by Daniel P. Gross

Information plays a critical role in technological progress, yet many inventors opt for trade secrecy to protect their intellectual property. This paper studies the myriad repercussions of concealing new inventions through the lens of a systematic and sweeping invention secrecy policy implemented by the USPTO during World War II.

Some Facts of High-Tech Patenting

by Michael Webb, Nick Short, Nicholas Bloom, and Josh Lerner

This study details the growth of patenting in software, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and related technologies in the twenty-first century, and the continuing dominance of inventors in large US, Japanese, and Korean companies. Researchers still need to understand the impact of such trends on social welfare more generally.

Why South Korea's Samsung Built the Only Outdoor Skating Rink in Texas

by Michael Blanding

New research by Lauren Cohen and Umit Gurun finds that when some companies are sued, they put their advertising dollars to work in unusual ways to influence local juries. Meet 'TiVo,' the championship steer. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

The Use and Misuse of Patent Data: Issues for Corporate Finance and Beyond

by Josh Lerner and Amit Seru

Corporate finance researchers who analyze patent data are at risk of making highly predictable errors. The problem arises from dramatic changes in the direction and location of technological innovation (and patenting practice) over recent decades. This paper explains the pitfalls and suggests practical steps for avoiding them.

Patent Trolls and Small-Business Employment

by Ian Appel, Joan Farre-Mensa, and Elena Simintzi

Patent trolls are organizations that own patents but do not make or use the patented technology directly, instead using their patent portfolios to target firms with patent-infringement claims. This paper provides evidence that state anti-troll laws have had a net positive effect for small firms in high-tech industries. There is no significant effect for larger or non-high-tech firms.

Foreign Competition and Domestic Innovation: Evidence from US Patents

by David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, Pian Shu and Gary Pisano

US firms in industries exposed to greater change in import competition from China have suffered worse growth in patenting and R&D spending than firms in industries exposed to less change in Chinese competition.

Challenging the Belief that Liability Laws Kill Medical Device Innovation

by Michael Blanding

Many policymakers believe liability laws need reforming so that medical device makers are free to innovate without threat of costly lawsuits. But new research by Hong Luo and Alberto Galasso suggests innovation is not thwarted—just rechanneled. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Innovation Network

by Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, and William Kerr

Despite recent advances that measure how the technological development processes in innovative fields link with each other, our understanding of how progress in one technological area links to prior advances in upstream technological fields has been limited. The authors’ analysis and mapping of 1.8 million U.S. patents and their citation properties shows that a stable innovation network acts as a conduit for a cumulative process of technological and scientific progress. Upstream technological developments play an important role in the future pace and direction of patenting in downstream fields. This finding implies that if R&D slackens in one period the effects will still be felt years later in downstream fields.

Patent Disclosures and Standard-Setting

by Josh Lerner, Haris Tabakovic, and Jean Tirole

Technological standards are a central component of the modern network economy. Standard setting organizations (SSOs) play a variety of roles. One of the most important is ensuring the disclosure of relevant intellectual property—in particular, potentially essential patents—prior to the key decisions about a proposed standard. This study finds that large downstream firms are more likely to make generic disclosures to SSOs. Higher quality patents are more likely to be disclosed via specific disclosures.

Technological Leadership (de)Concentration: Causes in ICTE

by Yasin Ozcan and Shane Greenstein

The market structure for the Information and Communications Technology equipment industry has undergone enormous changes in the last four decades. This paper characterizes long-term trends by analyzing the concentration in patents from 1976 to 2010 and comparing measured changes against popular assumptions about the size and scale of changes in innovation.

Crowdsourcing, Patent Trolls, and Other Research Insights Highlighted at Harvard Business School Symposium

by Dina Gerdeman & Carmen Nobel

The 2016 Faculty Research Symposium looked at current and potential collaborations between HBS and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Financial Patent Quality: Finance Patents After State Street

by Josh Lerner, Ann Leamon, Mark Baker & Andrew Speen

Although the past few decades have seen a surge in patents of inventions related to financial services, concerns have been raised about the quality of those patents. New research shows that finance patents in aggregate cite fewer non-patent publications and especially fewer academic publications.

The Bright Side of Patents

by Joan Farre-Mensa, Deepak Hegde & Alexander Ljungqvist

We examine whether patents help startups grow and succeed using detailed micro data on all patent applications filed by startups at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office since 2001 and approved or rejected before 2014. We find that patent approvals help startups create jobs, grow their sales, innovate, and reward their investors.

Immigrant Innovators: Job Stealers or Job Creators?

by Carmen Nobel

The H-1B visa program, which enables US employers to hire highly skilled foreign workers for three years, is "a lightning rod for a very heated debate," says Harvard Business School professor William Kerr. His latest research addresses the question of whether the program is good for innovation, and whether it impacts jobs for Americans. Key concepts include: An uptick in the number of H-1B visas given to Indian and Chinese engineers correlates with an increase in the number of US patents. The H-1B program seems to have no overall effect on the number of jobs held by American-born scientists and engineers, nor does it affect the number of patents from inventors who have Anglo-Saxon names. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.