@article{03fd006fc73a4193b78ce69c768758ec,
title = "Twenty years of US nanopatenting: Maintenance renewal scoring as an indicator of patent value",
abstract = "This paper introduces a new measure of patent value - Maintenance Renewal Score (MRSc) - reflecting assignee valuing the patent by paying successive renewal fees. We generate MRSc's for nanotechnology patents issued by the US Patent Office from 1999 through 2009, with US assignees and US inventors. Patenting increases over this period, coincident with increased US funding of nanotechnology R&D. We compare maintenance rates over the period, and against a comparison set of all 1999 USPTO grants to US inventors/assignees. We find differences in propensity to maintain the nanopatents by institution type, technological sector, and patent complexity.",
keywords = "Nanotechnology, Nanopatents, Bibliometrics, Tech mining, Patent renewals, Maintenance renewal score, MULTIPLE CRITERIA, TECHNOLOGY, INNOVATION, INSTITUTION, NANOSCIENCE, COUNTRY, SCIENCE",
author = "A.L. Porter and M. Markley and R. Snead and N.C. Newman",
note = "Funding Information: Nanotechnology (nano) is big (excuse the attempt at irony). It entails molecular manipulation from single atoms to matter up to about 100 nm (1 nm = 1 × 10⁻⁹ meters) scale. US R&D funding through the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) approached $2 billion per year (Fig. 2). Nano has attributes of a general purpose Science and Technology (S&T), with applications in materials science and industrial uses of materials, biomedicine, and many other S&T domains [1]. Our searches, elaborated later, identify well over 1 million scientific nano publications in Web of Science and over 50,000 US patents. Nanopatenting has high impacts on technological innovation and the economy.Another unusual component of the NNI is the length of sustained funding. The NNI has been operating for over twenty years. Impact of federal funding on private sector patenting has been studied by researchers such as Mansfield [3], but little research exists on the impact of two decades of US government, ongoing innovation-focused funding by a major research program like NNI. Knowing evidence that the NNI increased patenting [2], and that the program has decades of sustained funding, motivates our effort to measure the nature of US patenting in the nano realm and to help assess how well this unusual effort is succeeding over time.In the early years covered in these analyses, the INPADOC Legal Event Code “FPAY” was used to indicate payment of a US maintenance fee. This code was supplanted by INPADOC Legal Event Code “MAFP” in 2018. In order to account for this switch in data categorization, all instances of MAFP were converted to FPAY. We spot-checked records against legal status data from Google Patents for confirmation. It was determined that this approach did not result in any double-counting of maintenance events.In Table 2, we see 3-term renewals for the nanopatents somewhat less frequently (40.5%) than the 52.5% that we discerned for all US assignee/inventor patents granted in 1999. Consistent with that, the MRSc value of 1.95 for this set of nanopatents is lower than the MRSc score of 2.06 for all 1999 US assignee/inventor patents.Results are consistent with the hypothesized relation of more claims leading to more renewing. In analyzing Canadian academic nanopatents filed in the US (i.e., to USPTO), Thamooresnejad and Beaudry [18] examined whether a higher number of claims associates with higher renewal rates, but could not support that, despite an association of more claims with other indicators of patent quality.This research has been conducted with support from the US National Science Foundation under Award No. 1759960 (Indicators of Technological Emergence). The findings and observations contained in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Funding Information: This research has been conducted with support from the US National Science Foundation under Award No. 1759960 (Indicators of Technological Emergence). The findings and observations contained in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2023 The Authors",
year = "2023",
month = jun,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1016/j.wpi.2023.102178",
language = "English",
volume = "73",
journal = "World Patent Information",
issn = "0172-2190",
publisher = "Elsevier Limited",
}