Gaétan de Rassenfosse (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Abstract
The paper proposes a novel, web-based approach to innovation policy evaluation. The approach overcomes several limitations affecting established valuation methods used in the literature. We implement it to study the impact of the U.S. DoD-SBIR program on technology commercialization. We start by identifying the universe of USPTO patents that acknowledge support by the SBIR program. We then track whether these patents are mentioned in relation to commercial products in a virtual patent marking page available on the recipient’s website. We interpret the latter event as signal of commercialization. Finally, we create a group of control patents and we compare the commercialization probability of SBIR-funded and control inventions. The results support the view that the SBIR program is quite effective at stimulating the commercialization of federally-funded scientific discoveries.