a Note on the value of patents as indicators of innovation: implications for management research

Deskripsi

In his essay, Jim Bessen finds that there is scant evidence in the literature to show that formal intellectual property rights stimulate growth or increase rates of innovation. Indeed, he finds that patents are not only insufficient to explain cross-national growth rates, they are unnecessary, and he gives ample instances of rapid growth and innovation in the absence of patents. A key takeaway from Bessen's article is that there is a great deal of unobserved heterogeneity in the ways in which intellectual property rights affect and interact with economic performance. This essay makes a similar claim that the devil is in the details for a different but related issue: the value of patents as indicators of innovation, and the implications for research using patent data. This article adopts a micro approach and looks at the relationship of patents to inventions themselves.