InterDigital Inc (IDCC)

[blueskywaves]

Some CHI Research tidbits:

In 1989, the international top 10 patenters in the U.S. system included 5 Japanese firms, 2 American firms and 3 European firms, but in 1998 the list contains 7 Japanese firms, 2 American firms, one Korean firm and no European firms. The common thread among all the Asian firms is their heavy involvement in information technology. Thus the general shift in U.S. patenting away from Europe and towards Asia is bound up with the global shift towards information technology. This evidence indicates that Europe, in general, has missed the rise of information technology.

There are, of course, areas where European companies are strong. Half of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies are European, and half are American; half of the top 10 chemical companies are European, 4 are American, and only 1 is Japanese.

http://www.chiresearch.com/about/newsletter/april99.php3

CHI’s March 1997 Newsletter "Industry Technology Has Strong Roots in Public Science" showed that some 73 percent of the science papers cited by U.S. industry patents were public science – authored at universities, laboratories, and other organizations primarily funded by public resources. The new finding reported here is that the papers cited in U.S. patents are preferentially drawn from the most highly cited, highest quality research. More specifically, a U.S. paper in the most highly cited 1% of scientific papers is 9 times as likely to be cited in a patent as is a randomly chosen U.S. paper.

http://www.chiresearch.com/about/newsletter/jul00.php3

However, numerous validation studies have shown the existence of a strong positive relationship between citations and technological importance. For example, Carpenter et. al. (1981) found that patents related to IR 100 invention awards are cited twice as often as typical patents. Also, Albert et. al. (1991)
showed that patents identified as important by industry experts were highly cited. Other studies have revealed a positive relationship between patent indicators and stock market valuations (Deng, Lev and Narin 1999) and between highly cited patents and increased sales and profits in the pharmaceutical industry (Narin, Noma and Perry, 1987)........

....................Narin and Breitzman (1995) showed that the top 10% of inventors are 3-4 times as productive as average inventors.

http://www.chiresearch.com/docs/tpordc.pdf

In this study CHI examined all 1,071 U.S. firms with 15 or more
US patents between 1996 and 2000. One-third of these firms
employ fewer than 500 people. Each of these small firms has
survived long enough to establish a substantial public record of
innovation represented by their patent portfolio. We label such
small firms “serial innovators.”

We found that serial innovators obtain patents that are more
technically important than the patents of large firms — 28% more highly cited, twice as likely to be among the top 1% of cited patents, and twice as closely linked to scientific research.

The serial innovators are concentrated in health and information
technology. Finally, serial innovators are more locally networked
than large firms.

We also looked briefly at the number of small US firm patents in the “occasionally patenting” range (one to 14 patents over five years) and estimate that the total small firm share of U.S. patenting is similar to the small firm share of manufacturing employment about 43%.

http://www.chiresearch.com/docs/nltxi1.pdf