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Patterns of Creation and Discovery An Analysis of Defense Laboratory Patenting and Innovation Kay Sullivan Faith PARDEE RAND GRADUATE SCHOOL Patterns of Creation and Discovery An Analysis of Defense Laboratory Patenting and Innovation Kay Sullivan Faith This document was submitted as a dissertation in August 2013 in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree in public policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. The faculty committee that supervised and approved the dissertation consisted of Cynthia Cook (Chair), Susan Marquis, Gery Ryan, and Rich Silberglitt. PARDEE RAND GRADUATE SCHOOL The Pardee RAND Graduate School dissertation series reproduces dissertations that have been approved by the student’s dissertation committee. The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND’s publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. R® is a registered trademark. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Copies may not be duplicated for commercial purposes. Unauthorized posting of RAND documents to a non-RAND website is prohibited. RAND documents are protected under copyright law. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit the RAND permissions page (http://www.rand.org/publications/permissions.html). Published 2013 by the RAND Corporation 1776 Main Street, P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138 1200 South Hayes Street, Arlington, VA 22202-5050 4570 Fifth Avenue, Suite 600, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-2665 RAND URL: http://www.rand.org To order RAND documents or to obtain additional information, contact Distribution Services: Telephone: (310) 451-7002; Fax: (310) 451-6915; Email: [email protected] Abstract Science and technology policy continues to be limited by how little is known about the drivers of innovation. One barrier in conducting systematic studies is the lack of an objective measure for innovation. Patents continue to be an attractive measurement tool, but many questions remain about their comprehensiveness, relevance in different domains, and accuracy given the highly skew med distributions seen in different estimates of patent value. This study develops a new approach to measuring research and innovation performance using patents by examining the trends in patent filings over time within organizations and within technology classes. Within any single organization’s patent portfolio, the sequence of patent filings over time in any given class tends to follow one of four patterns. These within-organization, within- class patterns are potentially signatures of specific research and commercialization approaches which have innovative connotations. This study develops several hypotheses regarding the organizational drivers of these patenting patterns and, using data from the DOD laboratories, demonstrates how these patenting patterns can be used to study the relationships between the rate and type of innovation and various quantitative and qualitative organizational characteristics. iii Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv Figures........................................................................................................................................... vii Tables ............................................................................................................................................. ix Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ xi Abbreviations ................................................................................................................................ xii Chapter 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Background ......................................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Approach ............................................................................................................................................ 3 1.3 Document structure ............................................................................................................................ 5 1.4 Note on sources .................................................................................................................................. 5 Chapter 2 Background .................................................................................................................... 6 2.1 Overview of current research performance measures ........................................................................ 6 2.1.1 Relevance of bibliometrics to DOD research goals .................................................................... 8 2.1.2 Inputs, outputs, and unobserved knowledge transition................................................................ 9 2.1.3 Measuring average versus innovative performance .................................................................... 9 2.1.4 Consistency of peer reviews in evaluating research processes .................................................. 10 2.2 A DOD-relevant definition of innovation as use .............................................................................. 11 2.3 Patent trends as an indicator of innovation ....................................................................................... 12 2.3.1 S-curves in the cumulative growth of patents per technology class .......................................... 13 2.3.2 Location on the S-curve as an indicator of innovativeness ....................................................... 17 2.4 From cumulative s-curves to within-organization patenting patterns .............................................. 20 Chapter 3 Within-Organization Patent Patterns: identification and data sources ......................... 21 3.1 Identifying within-organization patent patterns: methodology overview ......................................... 22 3.2 Organizations of interest ................................................................................................................... 22 3.3 Data sources ...................................................................................................................................... 23 3.3.1 DOD TechMatch ....................................................................................................................... 24 3.3.2 Note on identifying patents resulting from extramural or cooperative research ....................... 25 3.3.3 Patent class and bibliographic data............................................................................................ 26 3.4 Data summary and limitations .......................................................................................................... 27 3.4.1 Summary of data set by laboratory ............................................................................................ 30 3.4.2 Impact of a restricted issue-year range on the data set .............................................................. 32 3.5 Visualization: creating and organizing histograms ........................................................................... 33 3.5.1 Patent Maps ............................................................................................................................... 34 3.6 Classify histograms by pattern type .................................................................................................