The effects of autocatalytic trade cycles on economic growth

This paper shows that autocatalytic trade cycles can be a positive feedback system for innovation and thus for economic growth. Using United Nations data, a trade network is proposed and a set of variables that represent the participation of countries in autocatalytic trade cycles is constructed. A clear relationship between these variables and economic growth is found since more innovation is produced in countries that are part of trade cycles. However, the relationship changes with autocatalytic trade cycle sizes, categories of goods and time scales. Moreover, autocatalytic trade cycles also have a positive effect for the trade flows involved, although this effect differs significantly depending on the size of the cycles. This new approach based on autocatalytic trade cycles emphasizes the benefits that countries can extract from trade cycles and points out the need of policies that foster these benefits. These conclusions strengthen existing literature, and also add new insights to innovation policy and the pursuit of economic prosperity

On the relation between patent citations and patent value

This paper reports the results of an analysis of patent citation and patent renewal data, advancing a log-linear relation between patent citations and patent value. A complementary analysis of firms’ patent portfolios confirms that modelling the relation between citations and firm value benefits from the adoption of the log-linear form.nrpages: 16status: publishe

A fresh look at patent citations

The number of times a patent is referenced by other patents is generally seen as a good indication of its value and its innovative contribution. However, there are three key issues with the practical application of this indicator, which is better known as patent citations, which obfuscate its use and thus threaten the validity of studies in which it is applied. This doctoral thesis will discuss and remedy these three problems. The first issue concerns the various methods that are in use to calculate patent citations. The results presented in this thesis indicate that these methods produce substantially different indicators and that generally indicators based on patent families, i.e. groups of related patents, present themselves as the preferred option. Next, it is found that patent citations and patent value are related through a log-linear relation, as opposed to the often-used linear relation. Starting from the legal and procedural role of citations, this thesis posits that patent citations relate to economic value albeit in two, distinctive, ways. These assertions are validated and empirically confirmed in this thesis. Overall, the results of this thesis are relevant to improve the measurement and understanding of patent citations. By doing so, this should further the understanding of innovation and intellectual property.status: publishe

Measuring technological novelty with patent-based indicators

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. This study provides a new, more comprehensive measurement of technological novelty. Integrating insights from the existing economics and management literature, we characterize inventions ex ante along two dimensions of technological novelty: Novelty in Recombination and Novelty in Knowledge Origins. For the latter dimension we distinguish between Novel Technological and Novel Scientific Origins. For each dimension we propose an operationalization using patent classification and citation information. Results indicate that the proposed measures for the different dimensions of technological novelty are correlated, but each conveys different information. We perform a series of analyses to assess the validity of the proposed measures and compare them with other indicators used in the literature. Moreover, an analysis of the technological impact of inventions identified as novel shows that technological novelty increases the variance of technological impact and the likelihood of being among the positive outliers with respect to impact. This holds particularly for those inventions that combine Novelty in Recombination with Novelty in Technological and Scientific Origins. Overall, the results support our indicator as ex ante measure of technological novelty with the potential to drive radical technological change.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Measuring technological novelty with patent-based indicators journaltitle: Research Policy articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2015.11.010 content_type: article copyright: Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.status: publishe

The effects of autocatalytic trade cycles on economic growth

This paper shows that autocatalytic trade cycles can be a positive feedback system for innovation and thus for economic growth. Using United Nations data, a trade network is proposed and a set of variables that represent the participation of countries in autocatalytic trade cycles is constructed. A clear relationship between these variables and economic growth is found since more innovation is produced in countries that are part of trade cycles. However, the relationship changes with autocatalytic trade cycle sizes, categories of goods and time scales. Moreover, autocatalytic trade cycles also have a positive effect for the trade flows involved, although this effect differs significantly depending on the size of the cycles. This new approach based on autocatalytic trade cycles emphasizes the benefits that countries can extract from trade cycles and points out the need of policies that foster these benefits. These conclusions strengthen existing literature, and also add new insights to innovation policy and the pursuit of economic prosperity.peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=tbem20status: publishe

Patent citation indicators: One size fits all?

The number of citations that a patent receives is considered an important indicator of the quality and impact of the patent. However, a variety of methods and data sources can be used to calculate this measure. This paper evaluates similarities between citation indicators that differ in terms of (a) the patent office where the focal patent application is filed; (b) whether citations from offices other than that of the application office are considered; and (c) whether the presence of patent families is taken into account. We analyze the correlations between these different indicators and the overlap between patents identified as highly cited by the various measures. Our findings reveal that the citation indicators obtained differ substantially. Favoring one way of calculating a citation indicator over another has non-trivial consequences and, hence, should be given explicit consideration. Correcting for patent families, especially when using a broader definition (INPADOC), provides the most uniform results.nrpages: 43status: publishe