This paper theoretically and empirically evaluates the relationship between the strength of inventors' motives and their productivity, and the interaction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. For our empirical analyses, we use novel data from a survey of Japanese inventors on 5,278...

This paper analyzes how standards as a knowledge source are important for R&D, how significantly the (backward) citations by a patent of standard-related documents measure such knowledge flow, and how significantly they affect the performance of downstream R&D. Using both the RIETI inventor...

This paper analyzes what types of R&D projects and R&D firms generate important spillover effects, and which are subject to funding constraints. It also analyzes what types of projects and firms are targeted for public support and whether the selection of targets is consistent with spillovers....

This paper analyzes the effects of uncertainty, rent dissipation, and a bundle of patents on corporate licenses. We use a newly developed data set, based on a large-scale survey (4,000 patents) of Japanese inventors, which uniquely covers the nature of the underlying research projects. Our major...

This paper empirically investigates the effects of patent thickets. One unique feature of our study is to identify two sources of patent thickets: (1) complementarity as measured by the number of the patents to be used jointly with the focal patent in commercialization, and (2) ownership...

Given the expected fundamental reform of Article 35 of the Japanese patent law, which has been governing the transfer of ownership of employee inventions to firms, the freedom of designing the incentive system for inventors would increase significantly. In order to provide basic guiding...

We conducted an inventor survey to examine the contribution of science to corporate inventions. The survey results show that for about one-quarter of the inventions, scientific knowledge embodied in literature, equipment, or research materials in the last 15 years was essential to conceive or...

This paper discusses factors that relate to the age of valid standards. Unlike patents and copyrights, standards are created without a fixed effective time set by law. A linked dataset is first prepared by connecting the technology categories of the Japanese Industrial Standards—the de jure...