Chair of Innovation and IP Policy, College of Management of Technology, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.
MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2019 Aug 12;14(8):e0218927. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0218927. eCollection 2019.
The U.S. government invests more than $50 billion per year in R&D procurement but we know little about the outcomes of these investments. We have traced all the patents arising from government funding since the year 2000. About 1.5 percent of all R&D procurement contracts have led to at least one patent for a total of about 13,000 patents. However, contracts connected to patents account for 36 per cent of overall contract value. The gestation lag from the signing date of the contract to the patent filing is on average 33 months and does not depend on the type of R&D performed. Patents that are produced faster also seem to be more valuable. We find strong decreasing returns to contract size. Conditional on generating at least one patent, a 1-percent increase in the size of an R&D contract is associated with 0.12 percent more patents.
美国政府每年在研发采购上的投入超过 500 亿美元，但我们对这些投资的结果知之甚少。我们追溯了自 2000 年以来所有由政府资金产生的专利。大约 1.5%的研发采购合同至少产生了一项专利，总共约有 13000 项专利。然而，与专利相关的合同占合同总价值的 36%。从合同签订日期到专利申请的孕育期平均为 33 个月，与研发类型无关。更快产生的专利似乎也更有价值。我们发现合同规模的回报呈强烈递减。在产生至少一项专利的前提下，研发合同规模增加 1%，与专利数量增加 0.12%相关。
