The Birth of a New Industry: Entry by Start-ups and the Drivers of Firm Growth. The Case of Encryption Software

The paper analyses the birth of the Encryption Software Industry (ESI), a new niche in the software industry. Using a Chandlerian perspective, this work reports the main facts about firm entry and growth, with a particular focus on start-up strategies and actions. Since scale economies do not play a major role in ESI, the paper investigates the different sources of firm competitive advantages. This work shows that innovation and product differentiation, along with investments in co-specialised assets, are variables strongly correlated to young firm probability to survive and grow. In so doing, we have collected highly detailed information on product introduction, US patents granted, worldwide alliances and biographical data of firm founders.Entry, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Software.

Assessing the Status of Autonomous Vehicles Innovation Using Patent Data

The transportation industry is undergoing an unprecedented revolution as researchers in the field expect the adoption of autonomous vehicles (AV) in a not-too-distant future. Even though there is no fully automated vehicle on the road currently, several features of driver’s assistance (e.g., lane departure warning, rear cameras, blind-spot warning) are integrated into most of the recent vehicles. It is therefore fundamental for industry leaders and policymakers to comprehend the state-of-the-art of AV innovation. The main purpose of this study is to assess the current status of AV innovations in the U.S. market. My analysis, based on more than 2,000 patents retrieved from the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) PatentsView database, has five main findings. First, there is a significant increase in autonomous vehicle patents approved by USPTO since 2010. Between 2010 to 2018, the number of patents increased by about 18 folds from 27 to 516. Secondly, in terms of AV innovators, the new entrant high-tech companies are taking over the incumbent automakers in the AV technologies. Third, industries involved in AV innovation have unequal levels of development in different technology sectors and fields. High-tech companies are leading in smart environment technologies. The incumbent automakers had an established predominance in the vehicle platform technologies. Fourth, of all the patents approved by the USPTO, about two-thirds are held by US companies, and one third held by foreign companies primarily from Asia and Europe. Fifth, in the US, California is the epicenter of AV innovation with nearly 40 percent of US patents. Michigan holds 18 percent of the total, given the presence of traditional automobile manufacturers including Ford and GM

Novel science for novel technology?

This paper explores the complex relationship between scientific novelty and technology impact, where we measure recombinant novel science as publications which make new combinations of prior knowledge and trace links between science and technology by scientific references in patent applications. We draw on all the SCIE journal articles published in 2001 and all the patents in PATSTAT version 201310. We find that only a small proportion (about 10%) of scientific publications are directly referenced as prior art in subsequent technological inventions, but a small number of scientific papers which score on novelty (about 11%) are significantly more likely to have direct technological impact compared to similar non-novel papers, particularly the 1% highly novel scientific papers. In addition to this superior likelihood of direct impact, novel science also has a higher probability for indirect technological impact, being more likely to be cited by other scientific papers which have technological impact. Among the set of scientific papers cited at least once by patents, there are no additional significant differences in the speed or the intensity of the technological impact between novel and non-novel scientific prior art, but the technological impact from novel science is significantly broader and reaching new technology fields previously non-impacted by its scientific discipline. Novel science is also significantly more likely to be impacting technology inventions which are themselves recombinant novel

Mapping London's Innovation Networks

A wide range of authors have highlighted the potential benefits for entrepreneurial companies that engage in effective networking along and across the supply-chain. As many organisations have downsized or outsourcedbasic research activities Universities have an increasingly important role within such networks. A number of UK initiatives have been established to encourage greater 'entanglement' between academia and commerce; the London Technology Network is one example which is intended to encourage interactions between London's leading research institutes and innovative businesses.Using the detailed data acquired by this network this paper is intended to presents an exploratory analysis of such activities with the aim of establishing the extent to which company size, sector and/or location play a significant role in participation in the network's activities. A wide range of authors have highlighted the potential benefits for entrepreneurial companies that engage in effective networking along and across the supply-chain. As many organisations have downsized or outsourced basic research activities Universities have an increasingly important role within such networks. A number of UK initiatives have been established to encourage greater 'entanglement' between academia and commerce; the London Technology Network is one example which is intended to encourage interactions between London's leading research institutes and innovative businesses.Using the detailed data acquired by this network this paper is intended to presents an exploratory analysis of such activities with the aim of establishing the extent to which company size, sector and/or location play a significant role in participation in the network's activities

Unfolding the innovation system for the development of countries: co-evolution of Science, Technology and Production

We show that the space in which scientific, technological and economic developments interplay with each other can be mathematically shaped using pioneering multilayer network and complexity techniques. We build the tri-layered network of human activities (scientific production, patenting, and industrial production) and study the interactions among them, also taking into account the possible time delays. Within this construction we can identify which capabilities and prerequisites are needed to be competitive in a given activity, and even measure how much time is needed to transform, for instance, the technological know-how into economic wealth and scientific innovation, being able to make predictions with a very long time horizon. Quite unexpectedly, we find empirical evidence that the naive knowledge flow from science, to patents, to products is not supported by data, being instead technology the best predictor for industrial and scientific production for the next decades

Competition and Innovation - Microeconometric Evidence Using Finnish Data

In this study we provide a theoretical prediction of a complementary relationship between the incentive effects of product market competition and R&D subsidies using the theory of Aghion et. al (1997, 2001). The complementarity relationship and that of an inverted U-relationship is then tested using a large Finnish firm level data set combined with patent and patent citations of the firms. Econometric analysis shows that the inverted U-relationship is fairly robust to different innovation measures derived from patent data. We also find that the inverted-U relationship tends to be steeper when also R&D subsidies are considered. This result suggests that there exists a complementarity between competition and R&D subsidies.Product market competition, Innovations, R&D subsidies

Explaining the First Industrial Revolution: Two Views

This review essay looks at the recent books on the British Industrial Revolution by Robert Allen and Joel Mokyr. Both writers seek to explain Britain’s primacy. This paper offers a critical but sympathetic account of the main arguments of the two authors considering both the economic logic and the empirical validity of their rival claims. In each case, the ideas are promising but the evidence base seems in need of further support. It may be that eventually these explanations for British economic leadership at the turn of the nineteenth century are recognized as complementary rather than competing.

Patent citation analysis with Google

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley-Blackwell in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 23/09/2015, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23608 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Citations from patents to scientific publications provide useful evidence about the commercial impact of academic research, but automatically searchable databases are needed to exploit this connection for large-scale patent citation evaluations. Google covers multiple different international patent office databases but does not index patent citations or allow automatic searches. In response, this article introduces a semiautomatic indirect method via Bing to extract and filter patent citations from Google to academic papers with an overall precision of 98%. The method was evaluated with 322,192 science and engineering Scopus articles from every second year for the period 1996–2012. Although manual Google Patent searches give more results, especially for articles with many patent citations, the difference is not large enough to be a major problem. Within Biomedical Engineering, Biotechnology, and Pharmacology & Pharmaceutics, 7% to 10% of Scopus articles had at least one patent citation but other fields had far fewer, so patent citation analysis is only relevant for a minority of publications. Low but positive correlations between Google Patent citations and Scopus citations across all fields suggest that traditional citation counts cannot substitute for patent citations when evaluating research

The diffusion of disruptive technologies

We identify novel technologies using textual analysis of patents, job postings, and earnings calls. Our approach enables us to identify and document the diffusion of 29 disruptive technologies across firms and labor markets in the U.S. Five stylized facts emerge from our data. First, the locations where technologies are developed that later disrupt businesses are geographically highly concentrated, even more so than overall patenting. Second, as the technologies mature and the number of new jobs related to them grows, they gradually spread across space. While initial hiring is concentrated in high-skilled jobs, over time the mean skill level in new positions associated with the technologies declines, broadening the types of jobs that adopt a given technology. At the same time, the geographic diffusion of low-skilled positions is significantly faster than higher-skilled ones, so that the locations where initial discoveries were made retain their leading positions among high-paying positions for decades. Finally, these technology hubs are more likely to arise in areas with universities and high skilled labor pools