1. Inventors Important, under-studied issues (but Trajtenberg): - inventors’ life cycle - distribution of productivity across inventors - determinants of quantity vs. “quality” of their innovations - … Implications and policy interest: education and incentive system, allocation of resources, managerial policies. Some work on the distribution of productivity (small samples in specific companies), but little on the determinants. Why? Lack of data (b/c not in the patent document) and practically no personal information about them (compare w/ scientists)

2. PatVal provides data on inventors’ personal characteristics:  Age and gender  Education  Working experience (and mobility)  Rewards (motivations to invent?) And other information specific to the patent- inventor (i.e. sources of knowledge that the inventor used to develop the surveyed patent, collaborations with other individuals, etc.)

3. Sex, age and education of the inventors * Standard dev in parenthesis

4. Inventors’ rewards We asked inventors to rate the six motivations from 1 (not important) to 5 (very important).

5. With PatVal you need complementary data to trace the inventors’ career, e.g. - all patents applied/granted during their career - the quality of such innovations - publications - characteristics of other organizations where they were employed while developing the patents …

6. We collected complementary data for about 800 PatVal inventors. Karin Hoisl collected data for the German inventors in PatVal … the usual matching problems: e.g. homonymous inventors and misspelled names (Trajtenberg again) Matching software+manual search and check.

7. Produce New Systematic Information on Inventors in order to: 1) Solve problems related the collection of existing information. Short-run: create a database on inventors (PatVal sample?): track all patents applied/granted to the individual inventors rank the inventor’s patents according to their value ID to inventors by the EPO?

8. 2) Collect new data (inventors’ survey?) to gather key information to address the productivity-related issues: age in which they enter the “invention business” role of the inventor in the company/department/team ex-ante motivations to invent (rather than ex-post rewards) mobility throughout their career variables for cohorts in specific technologies social setting: is the inventor married, children, company social policy, etc (gender issues)