How Do the Speed, Science Linkage, Focus and New Entry Matter in IT Inventions?

This paper examines the speed, science linkage and focus of corporate RD Hall et al., 2000; Hirschey and Richardson, 2001, 2004; and Nagaoka, 2005). Given the extreme heterogeneity of the value of patents (see, for example, Scherer and Harhoff, 2000), it is important to use both quality and quantity measures of patents in assessing the R&D performance of a firm. The R&D performance of US firms in the IT sector improved significantly relative to the rest of the world in the 1990s in both of these two respects. The average citation per patent of the US firms is 28 per cent higher than that of the Japanese firms for the patents granted for the 1983–7 period, but it is 73 per cent higher than that of the Japanese firms for the patents granted for the 1993–7 period (see Figure 8.1).3