2006/06 | LEM Working Paper Series | |
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"Stacking" or "Picking" Patents? The Inventors' Choice Between Quantity and Quality |
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Myriam Mariani, Marzia Romanelli |
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Keywords | ||
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Productivity, Industrial Inventors, Patent Quality.
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Abstract | ||
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This paper studies the determinants
of the quantity and quality of inventors’ patents. It uses a
sample of 793 inventors drawn from the PatVal-EU dataset and the information on
EPO patents that they contributed to inventing during the period 1988-1998. It
explores three aspects of the inventors’ productivity: 1) the number of EPO
patents that they produce; 2) their average quality; 3) the quality of the most
valuable patents. By jointly estimating the three equations we find that the
inventors’ level of education, employment in a large firm and involvement in
large-scale research projects positively affect quantity. Yet, apart
from the size of the research project, none of these factors directly
influences the expected quality of the innovations. They do, however,
indirectly, as we find that the number of innovations explains the probability
of producing a technological hit (the maximum value). Also, there are no
decreasing returns in the innovation process at an individual level, as the number
of innovations that an inventor produces is not correlated with their average
quality.
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