This paper asks the question: Can we see evidence of General Purpose Technologies in patent data? Using data on three million US patents granted between 1967 and 1999, and their citations received between 1975 and 2002, we construct a number of measures of GPTs, including generality, number of citations, and patent class growth, for patents themselves and for the patents that cite the patents. A selection of the top twenty patents in the tails of the distribution of several of these measures yields a set of mostly ICT technologies, of which the most important are those underlying transactions on the internet and object-oriented software. We conclude with a brief discussion of the problems we encountered in developing our measures and suggestions for future work in this area.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
10901.
Length: Date of creation: Nov 2004 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10901
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Find related papers by JEL classification: O33 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Technological Change - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes O31 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Technological Change - - - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives L86 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Information and Internet Services; Computer Software
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