Federal lab commercialization is explored (1) by analyzing U.S. government patents and (2) in a qualitative analysis of one NASA lab's patents. Tests apply to three distinct sets of patents, l963-94: NASA, all other U.S. government, and a random sample of all U.S. inventors' patents. The federal patenting rate plummeted in the 1970s. Consistent with increasing commercialization, both NASA's and other federal agencies' rates recovered in the 1980s. The case study finds citations to be a valid, but noisy, measure of technology spillovers. Excluding 'spurious' cites, two-thirds of cites to patents of NASA-Lewis' Electro-Physics Branch were evaluated as involving spillovers. Copyright 1998 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.