Progress in understanding the relationship between basic research and economic growth requires high-quality data on patents and patenting. Barriers to acquiring, cleaning, and sharing such data remain a significant hurdle to conducting empirical research on a wide range of topics, including the return on investment to basic science investment, the productivity of scientific teams, regulatory impacts on patenting and innovation, and much more. This grant provides funding to the “Innovation Information Initiative,” or I3, a collaborative project to build a linked series of state-of-the-art, open databases that make high-quality patent data easily available to researchers. Led by Yarn Labs, a not-for-profit spin off of the MIT Media Lab, the project will clean and document existing sources of patent data; create new data products that include a catalog of links between patents and products; disambiguate authors, institutions, funders, and titles; and compile patent citations to the scholarly literature. To facilitate use of these new resources, the team will develop user-friendly interfaces and a series of models, algorithms, and other analysis tools. Outreach plans include organizing an annual research meeting alongside the NBER Summer Institute; an annual meeting to coordinate technical matters; and fellowships for Ph.D. students interested in the rigorous study of patenting.

The Summer Institute run by the National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER) is an annual gathering of empirical economists that takes place over three weeks of July in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is widely recognized as the most significant meeting of its kind. In 2018, more than 2,200 economists from 427 institutions participated in at least one of over 50 workshops on a wide range of economic topics, from behavioral macroeconomics to innovation and digitization. Indeed, organizers of the Summer Institute work hard to attract the highest quality research and researchers. The selection process is highly competitive. In 2018, for example, over 5,800 submissions were made and fewer than 10% were accepted. The structure and range of activities taking place at the Summer Institute make it a unique venue for cross-fertilization of ideas. Workshops and lunches are deliberately scheduled to overlap in order to increase the likelihood of interaction between researchers interested in related fields. Participant surveys show high satisfaction with the quality and breadth of the presentations, and appreciation for the opportunity to meet other researchers and initiate new collaborations. This grant provides operating support to NBER to continue to host the Institute for three years.