Uncovering GPTS with Patent Data / Bronwyn H. Hall, Manuel Trajtenberg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hall, Bronwyn H.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Trajtenberg, Manuel.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w10901.

NBER working paper series no. w10901

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2004.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

November 2004.