2/28/2009 9:56:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The National Bureau of Economic Research's Innovation Policy and the Economy Working Group is seeking paper proposals for a 50th anniversary conference in honor of The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity. This 1962 NBER volume contains several landmark papers in the economics of technological change, including Ken Arrow's essay, Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention. This should be a great conference/volume to be involved.
Read for the full call for papers.
2/26/2009 3:23:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
There is little doubt to me that those of us following innovation measurement are patent obsessed, but that's not often because we want to be. But as much as we talk about moving away from patents, patents are relatively easy to get data on and as such patents remain the dominant source of data used to look at innovation by academics around the world. The OECD Patent Statistics Manual is a primer for anyone looking to use patents as an indicator. Check out their newly revised edition on the OECD's patent statistics page.
Chapter 1. Objectives and Scope of the Manual
Chapter 2. Patents as Statistical Indicators of Science and Technology
Introduction | Legal foundations of patents | Administrative routes for protection | Economic foundations of patents | The information content of patent documents | Patents as statistical indicators of inventive activity | Patent databases | Topics of investigation
Chapter 3. Patent Systems and Procedures
Introduction | The core patenting procedure | National and regional procedures | International patent applications
Chapter 4. Basic Criteria for Compiling Patent-Based Indicators
Introduction | Reference date | Reference country | PCT applications | Patent families | Normalised country-level patent indicators
Chapter 5. Classifying Patents by Different Criteria
Introduction | Technology fields | Industry classification | Regional classification | Institutional sectors | Patents by companies | Patents by investors
Chapter 6. The Use and Analysis of Citations in Patents
Introduction | What are citations? | Uses and applications of citations indicators | Citation practices in patent offices | Citation-based indicators | Non-patent literature | Other indicators based citation categories (EPO and PCT search reports)
Chapter 7. Indicators of Internationalisation of Science and Technology
Introduction | Indicators | Ownership and research strategies
Chapter 8. Indicators of Patent Value
Introduction | Forward citations | Indicators
2/26/2009 3:02:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The U.S. Census Bureau and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development are holding a seminar on July 15 and 16, 2009, on
Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge. While there isn't much detail available on their website yet, the event looks interesting enough for me to have added as a tentative on my calendar. While some companies have jumped in to take previously unusable data and make it usable knowledge (Google comes to mind most prominently), much room remains for improvement and leverage of our existing knowledge. Most of my focus in recent years has been on finding ways to leverage the data we have collected through additional research, but the next step of translation is perhaps more important and difficult to crack.
2/25/2009 8:19:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
We have been approached on a survey that would pull significantly from the American Student List. Are you familiar with this product? Do you have survey experience you could share with us? We used
Harris Interactive for a piece a couple of years back, which is about the extent of my knowledge in this arena.
2/24/2009 10:32:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
An article and an op-ed from today's New York Times that were seemingly unrelated got me thinking. The first article was on Dr. Larry Brilliant's change in direction at Google.org (their philanthropic effort). The op-ed by Kenneth Duberstein focused in on the need for a centralized state of the union in data that he proposes be run out of the National Academies.
While these are seemingly very different topics, I see a great deal of possible relation. The State of the U.S.A. project has been percolating for the last year, that I know of, in many Washington, DC, circles. While I think there are many things that make sense about the project as I understand it - timely, relevant data - I am concerned about the ability of the National Academies to find means in which they can reach the people of the United States, not just the policy wonks and data-obsessed. That is where my mind jumped to Google and some of the amazing things they have done in the last year with Google Flu Trends, and I began hoping the Google might somehow launch down the path of helping countries to set up their own Google Country Trends-type of platform. Real-time data, drawn from other people's series as well as Google data, that countries could help to define and Google would help to bring to the people. At the heart of what Dr. Brilliant's article said was that Google was trying to find ways to bring its philanthropic efforts back inside the house and relevant to their business work.
While I am on the subject, I have some concerns about whether having a State of the U.S.A. will actually give us the detail needed to make decisions. So many of these decisions are made at the state and local level, but much of the data which the State of the U.S.A. would inevitably use would not be available at the sub-national level. It's a real problem for many of our data series, one that I've particularly learned about from Andy Reamer at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. There is little doubt that the National Academies brings the best in the country together in a non-partisan way (Connie Citro does amazing work with the Committee on National Statistics), but Google, or their type of real-time data interface, is something that I doubt the National Academies could achieve, at least unaided.
2/24/2009 2:38:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has released a new beta service called
Key Tables. It's an attempt to make their most frequently requested tabular statistics available in an easier-to-use central place. I've often been frustrated by their
Source OECD service, which has seemed overwhelming and confusing to me in past attempts to use. In browsing their site today, it looks as if Source OECD is also getting a remake and introducing a new premium product,
OECD.Stat, as a part of a larger initiative to
increase dissemination of their statistics. It'd be great to hear how users of some of these new services are finding the products.
2/23/2009 10:49:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
As I talked about a couple of weeks ago, we are in the middle of reviewing the Kauffman Firm Survey questionnaire before going back to the field in late spring for the fifth round of survey work. Recently, we have reconsidered the need to ask a question about training that the businesses have received. In hindsight, we should have asked this from the beginning but we haven't. Now we are at the point where we need feedback about this specific question and the value it brings in being asked at this point in the overall process of this panel data collection process.
Training_question_022309.pdf (74.65 kb)
2/23/2009 6:11:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Today's
Wall Street Journal highlights new data on IPOS and venture capital in 2008. If you have been tuned out of this world for more than a year than you will be astounded by the statistics. 2008 saw the IPO market basically run dry and 2009 is not looking good. But while National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) data showed declines, they were nothing compared to IPOS, showing a monetary decline of 8 percent and a 4 percent decline in the number of companies funded. The decline of the IPO market has been covered by many others including on
another Kauffman blog, Growthology, for those looking to explor this more.
2/23/2009 2:57:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The Census Bureau released some new statistics from the American Community Survey last week on immigrants. Buried in the data is information on self-employed among non-native born individuals in the United States. I haven't had time to pull out specifically yet for all groups. I did, however, take notice of a couple of interesting findings related to education/occupation of some different groups, most notably this statement from their release: "U.S. residents born in India have the highest percentage of civilian-employed people working in management, professional and related occupations (69 percent). These occupations employ about 36 percent of the native civilian-employed U.S. population and 27 percent of the foreign-born."
Additionally last week I came across a new working paper on immigrant entrepreneurs that makes use of a new data source for studying immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States, the New Immigrant Survey. What I love about this piece is that it's the first data that I am aware of which is actually able to look at individual entrepreneur backgrounds of new immigrants in the United States and to bring in their home country job experience prior to immigration.
- Akee, Randall, Jaeger, David A. and Tatsiramos, Konstantinos,The Persistence of Self-Employment Across Borders: New Evidence on Legal Immigrants to the United States. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1136412
Other recent studies have tried to compare self-employment among specific immigrant populations in the United States and in their home country.
- Fairlie, Robert W. and Woodruff, Christopher M.,Mexican Entrepreneurship: A Comparison of Self-Employment in Mexico and the United States(March 2006). IZA Discussion Paper No. 2039. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=892841
And this study tries to look at the effect of immigrant self-employment upon native born self-employment.
- Fairlie, Robert W. and Meyer, Bruce D.,The Effect of Immigration on Native Self-Employment. NBER Working Paper No. W7561. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=217548
2/21/2009 9:42:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Are you aware of new data that might be of interest to the marketing community? Then please contact the organizers of this upcoming symposium.
UIC/MEIG Marketing and Entrepreneurship Research Interface Symposium
August 5-7, 2009
University of Illinois at Chicago
Entrepreneurial marketing topics are rarely integrated in mainstream marketing doctoral coursework and readings. In 2007, the UIC Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, the Kauffman Foundation, and American Marketing Association's Marketing-Entrepreneurship SIG invited doctoral students from around the world who were studying marketing and entrepreneurship to attend the UIC Symposium on the Marketing Entrepreneurship Research Interface. Over a dozen doctoral students, many from outside the United States, attended the Symposium held at George Washington University. The success of this event encouraged the Symposium organizers to develop and integrate a special colloquium for the doctoral students at the 2008 Symposium, with a special focus on "International Marketing Entrepreneurship," coordinated by the Swedish Business School at Örebro University. The 2008 Colloquium was extremely successful, leading to a 2009 colloquium.
The Kauffman Foundation and the Marketing and Entrepreneurship SIG invites doctoral students and new assistant professors to gather and discuss emerging issues in the area, just prior to the American Marketing Association Summer Educators' Meeting. This second Colloquium will be held at the University of Illinois at Chicago. International scholars will be invited to address various issues of relevance to young researchers. These presentations will be held in the opening afternoon of the Annual UIC Marketing and Entrepreneurship Research Symposium, and integrated with the rest of the Symposium program.
Doctoral students and new assistant professors are invited to this Colloquium. Fellows will be provided complimentary admission to the Symposium, all Symposium meals, and a small stipend to offset a portion of their airline/hotel expenses. Contact Glenn Omura at omura@msu.edu for nomination/application information.