1. The NBER Patent Data Project: Past data uses and future plans
Prof. Bronwyn H. Hall
University of California at Berkeley, University of Maastricht, NBER, and IFS London

2. Outline Currently available NBER patent data from the USPTO
Uses of these data
The new PDP (Patent Data project) at NBER
What do we add
Where do we stand now
discussion
Jan 2006
EPIP Bocconi Workshop

3. NBER Patent Citations Data File
~3 million U.S. patents granted between January 1963 and December 1999 (now updated to 2002)
Patent number, application and grant dates
Name of first inventor; name and type of assignee
Country and state of first inventor
Main US patent class; number of claims; main IPC class from 76
Number of citations, forward and backward; generality and originality measures based on citations
All citations made to these patents between 1975 and 1999 (over 16 million)
Match of patenting organizations to Compustat (the data set of all firms traded in the U.S. stock market)
Available at
emlab.berkeley.edu/users/bhhall/bhdata.html (2002 update)
Jan 2006
EPIP Bocconi Workshop

4. Use of NBER patent data
>100 significant research projects (at least one quarter outside the US)
~100 published papers
~50 doctoral dissertations in accounting(1), agric econ (1), econ (22), finance (3), history (1), info tech (1), law(2), management (15), public policy (1), unknown(3)
Jan 2006
EPIP Bocconi Workshop

5. Research areas Positive Normative
Individual inventors – migration and co-invention, spillovers
Organizations, networks, and innovation
Geography of innovation
Knowledge spillovers, local and international
Citations as a value indicator
Normative
The patent explosion and its implications for firms, the patent office, and social welfare
Patent policy – legal and administrative; the examination process
Patent and patent litigation strategy
University and laboratory patenting
Jan 2006
EPIP Bocconi Workshop

6. The PDP project at NBER
A new project to update and extend the publicly available USPTO data
Principal investigators:
Iain Cockburn (BU), Bronwyn Hall (UCB), Walter (Woody) Powell (Stanford), Manuel Trajtenberg (Tel Aviv)
Senior investigators:
Ajay Agarwal (Toronto), James Bessen (BU), Stuart Graham (GA Tech), Megan Macgarvie (BU)
Jan 2006
EPIP Bocconi Workshop

7. Database design principles
Accessibility
Provide public tools (xml based) to allow others to extract data
Modularity (as in the OECD/EPO effort)
Linking out - an open source-like environment so that others can link their data to the patent data
Provide attribution and citation so contributors are recognized
Annotation
By users – e.g., error correction, identification of SW or gene patents, etc
Jan 2006
EPIP Bocconi Workshop

8. Tasks and objectives Update existing data to 2007
Clean and standardize
Compute normalization coefficients to correct for truncation, differences across fields in citation practice
Additional data (see next slide)
Link outs to
Patstat
Litigation data
Assignee name data
Geo-coded data
Jan 2006
EPIP Bocconi Workshop

9. Additional data
Detailed tech class info – full set of USPC and IPC codes
Priority information
Foreign application data
Continuation and divisional relationships
Multiple assignee information
Inventors
names for tracking migration, co-invention, etc.
detailed location info for all inventors
Source of citations (applicants vs. examiners)
Attorney and patent agent names
Reexamination requests and outcomes
Jan 2006
EPIP Bocconi Workshop

10. Jan 2006
EPIP Bocconi Workshop

11. Currently: cleaning raw data
ASSG - assignees (Cockburn, Agarwal)
CLAS - classification (MacGarvie, Hall)
FREF - foreign references (Cockburn)
GOVT - government interest (Graham)
INVT - inventors (Cockburn, Agarwal)
LREP - legal representatives (not used for now)
OREF - other references (not used for now)
PATN - basic patent info (Bessen)
PRIR - priority information (Graham)
PCTA - PCT information (Cockburn)
REIS - reissue information (Graham)
RLAP - related application info (Graham)
UREF - US references (Cockburn, Trajtenberg)
Jan 2006
EPIP Bocconi Workshop

12. Geographical data (inventor and assignee address)
data from USPTO (to be cleaned)
City (8000 Munchen?)
State (CA vs CA)
Country
data from non-USPTO sources
Regions (SMSA, Canadian provinces, European NUTS/LAU regions)
Latitude-longitude coordinates
Need to normalize geographical names to match source e.g., Vienna vs. Wien)
Jan 2006
EPIP Bocconi Workshop

13. Assignee names
K U Leuven project for Eurostat OECD/WIPO/EPO consortium
Derwent world patent index
117 pages of 4 char codes for std names
A large number of rules (Russian inst, Japanese cos, etc.)
Rules for nonstandard co codes
IFS project – more later
One question: what to do about the extended character set?
München vs Munich vs Muenchen vs Munchen
Derwent uses ue
Jan 2006
EPIP Bocconi Workshop

14. Jan 2006
EPIP Bocconi Workshop