This invaluable book provides a comprehensive overview of twenty years of research on the economics of innovation and patent policies. Edited by Bruno van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, the papers in this volume witness twenty years of advanced empirical research — triggered by intensive collaboration and inspired by his own professional experience at the OECD, METI and the European Patent Office. The Editor's publications in these fields have greatly contributed to better understand how innovation can be stimulated, how it can be measured, through which channels it contributes to growth, with a particular emphasis on the role of patent systems. In the introductory chapter, the Editor provides an overview of each subfield of investigation, by explaining the genesis of the research projects and adding some personal history. The book first displays major empirical findings on the effectiveness of science and technology policies in stimulating R&D, on how these policies affect the contribution of R&D to economic growth, and how to measure international R&D spillovers and what are their most effective channels. The policies that aim at stimulating innovation include R&D subsidies, public R&D, and R&D tax credits. The chapters that follow present foundational work on patent count methodologies aiming at improving innovation metrics, as well as creative contributions on patent valuation models. The book then presents pioneering contributions on the design of patent systems, including a thorough work on the role of fees, far-reaching analyses on quality, and critical contributions on the governance of patent systems in general and the European patent system in particular.

"The challenges facing agriculture are plenty. Along with the world's growing population and diminishing amounts of water and arable land, the gradual increase in severe weather presents new challenges and imperatives for producing new, more resilient crops to feed a more crowded planet in the twenty-first century. Innovation has historically helped agriculture keep pace with earth's social, population, and ecological changes. In the last 50 years, mechanical, biological, and chemical innovations have more than doubled agricultural output while barely changing input quantities. The ample investment behind these innovations was available because of a high rate of return: a 2007 paper found that the median ROI in agriculture was 45 percent between 1965 and 2005. This landscape has changed. Today many of the world's wealthier countries have scaled back their share of GDP devoted to agricultural R&D amid evidence of diminishing returns. Universities, which have historically been a major source of agricultural innovation, increasingly depend on funding from industry rather than government to fund their research. As Upton Sinclair wrote of the effects industry influences, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." In this volume of the NBER Conference Report series, editor Petra Moser offers an empirical, applied-economic framework to the different elements of agricultural R&D, particularly as they relate to the shift from public to private funding. Individual chapters examine the sources of agricultural knowledge and investigate challenges for measuring the returns to the adoption of new agricultural technologies, examine knowledge spillovers from universities to agricultural innovation, and explore interactions between university engagement and scientific productivity. Additional analysis of agricultural venture capital point to it as an emerging and future source of resource in this essential domain"--

The U.S. patent system is in an accelerating race with human ingenuity and investments in innovation. In many respects the system has responded with admirable flexibility, but the strain of continual technological change and the greater importance ascribed to patents in a knowledge economy are exposing weaknesses including questionable patent quality, rising transaction costs, impediments to the dissemination of information through patents, and international inconsistencies. A panel including a mix of legal expertise, economists, technologists, and university and corporate officials recommends significant changes in the way the patent system operates. A Patent System for the 21st Century urges creation of a mechanism for post-grant challenges to newly issued patents, reinvigoration of the non-obviousness standard to quality for a patent, strengthening of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, simplified and less costly litigation, harmonization of the U.S., European, and Japanese examination process, and protection of some research from patent infringement liability.

A study of how patents and citation data can serve empirical research on innovation and technological change.

This manual provides guiding principles for the use of patent data in the context of S&T measurement, and recommendations for the compilation and interpretation of patent indicators in this context.

We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between highand low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the parameters of the model using US Census micro data on firm-level output, R&D and patenting. The model provides a good fit to the dynamics of firm entry and exit, output and R&D. Taxing the continued operation of incumbents can lead to sizable gains (of the order of 1.4% improvement in welfare) by encouraging exit of less productive firms and freeing up skilled labor to be used for R&D by high-type incumbents. Subsidies to the R&D of incumbents do not achieve this objective because they encourage the survival and expansion of low-type firms.