Analyzing Patents Generated by SBIR Firms
Abstract
The Department of Defense is the single largest funder and consumer of research and development in the United States. The main incentives the DoD gives innovators are direct funding, research contests, and, increasingly, intellectual property rights protection. Institutions protecting intellectual property provide incentives for innovation, because they give innovators the ability to commercially exploit their inventions before others can enter the market with similar technologies. To this end, the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to grant inventors the right to patent their inventions. Patent rights are a controversial economic incentive that grants a temporary monopoly to the inventor to exploit the technology, in exchange for public declaration of the invention. Even more controversial is the retention of patent rights by private inventors conducting publicly funded research Proponents argue that giving private inventors title to their invention gives them incentives to commercialize their innovations, opponents argue that public research results should remain in the public domain, and not be given the temporary monopoly protection of patent. Until the 1980s, the default for the DoD in assigning patents rights was for the government to retain ownership, with private firms and individuals obtaining patent rights in exceptional circumstances. In the 1980s, the Bahy-Dole Act and Stevensen-Wilder Act, both in 1980 and the 1982, Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Act were part of a series of laws granting inventors and participating firms intellectual property rights, including patents rights to inventions funded by federal research money. To date there has been no systematic analysis of these laws on the propensity to patent DoD funded research. This research builds a database of patent funded by the DoD to see if the statutory changes have increased the propensity to patent of defense research performers.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 30, 2014
- Accession Number
- ADA624545
Entities
People
- Toby Edison
Organizations
- Defense Acquisition University