Based on a survey questionnaire administered to 1478 R&D labs in the U.S. manufacturing sector in 1994, we find that firms typically protect the profits due to invention with a range of mechanisms, including patents, secrecy, lead time advantages and the use of complementary marketing and manufacturing capabilities. Of these mechanisms, however, patents tend to be the least emphasized by firms in the majority of manufacturing industries, and secrecy and lead time tend to be emphasized most heavily. A comparison of our results with the earlier survey findings of Levin et al. [1987] suggest that patents may be relied upon somewhat more heavily by larger firms now than in the early 1980s. For the protection of product innovations, secrecy now appears to be much more heavily employed across most industries than previously. Our results on the motives to patent indicate that firms patent for reasons that often extend beyond directly profiting from a patented innovation through either its commercialization or licensing. In addition to the prevention of copying, the most prominent motives for patenting include the prevention of rivals from patenting related inventions (i.e., "patent blocking"), the use of patents in negotiations and the prevention of suits. We find that firms commonly patent for different reasons in "discrete" product industries, such as chemicals, versus "complex" product industries, such as telecommunications equipment or semiconductors. In the former, firms appear to use their patents commonly to block the development of substitutes by rivals, and in the latter, firms are much more likely to use patents to force rivals into negotiations.
In this paper, we use data from the Carnegie Mellon Survey on industrial R&D to evaluate for the U.S. manufacturing sector the influence of "public"(i.e., university and government R&D lab) research on industrial R&D, the role that public research plays in industrial R&D, and the pathways through which that effect is exercised. We find that public research is critical to industrial R&D in a small number of industries and importantly affects industrial R&D across much of the manufacturing sector. Contrary to the notion that university research largely generates new ideas for industrial R&D projects, the survey responses demonstrate that public research both suggests new R&D projects and contributes to the completion of existing projects in roughly equal measure overall. The results also indicate that the key channels through which university research impacts industrial R&D include published papers and reports, public conferences and meetings, informal information exchange, and consulting. We also finnd that, after controlling for industry, the influence of public research on industrial R&D is disproportionately greater for larger firms as well as start-ups.R&D, Innovation, Universities, Spillovers, Start-Ups
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.