Human resources are increasingly seen as a key to innovation competitiveness, and there is a need for detailed, systematic data on the demographics of inventors, their motivations, and their careers. To gain systematic data on who invents, we collected detailed information on a sample of...

The RIETI inventor survey, which was conducted in 2007, invited inventors to contribute their views and opinions on the constraints on the R&D performance of their organizations, and the policies and managerial agenda for improving it. A total of 1,300 inventors (around one quarter of those who...

This paper analyzes and compares the objective, the nature and the performance of R&D projects in the US and Japan, based on the first large scale systematic survey of inventors, focusing on the R&D projects yielding triadic patents. Major findings are the following. First, the projects for...

Based on the newly implemented inventor survey in Japan and the U.S., we have examined the commercialization and other uses of triadic patents. Although the two countries have a similar overall level of commercialization (60% of the triadic patents), the structure is different: in Japan, we see...

This report presents an overview of the results of an inventor survey, focusing on Japanese inventions for which priority claims were filed during the period 2003 to 2005 with both the Japan Patent Office (JPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO). This survey, conducted as a part of an...

This paper analyzes the life-cycle inventive productivity of Japanese industrial inventors, based on panel data of 1,731 inventors matched with firm data. We focus on two issues: whether inventors with PhD degrees perform better, even taking into account the late start in their business careers,...

This paper explores the sources of firm-level scale economies in R&D, based on unique project-level data from a new large-scale survey of Japanese inventors, matched with firm-level data. We focus on four sources: complementary assets, internal and external knowledge inflows, and inventor team...

This publication is in Japanese. Neither an English translation of the publication nor an English abstract is available.

Effective research and development (R&D) at companies and universities and the efficient commercialization of their results are considered vital to the future growth of the Japanese economy. However, social scientific knowledge on the objectives and motives of R&D, knowledge sources for...

This paper analyzes empirically how significantly the existence of non-contractible research effort by a vertical partner (as measured by a provision of a co-inventor) affects the ownership structure of vertical collaborative research and whether such effort also significantly enhances research...