Abstract
To meet researchers’ increasing interest in the fast growing innovation activities taking place in China, we match patents filed with China’s State Intellectual Property Office to firms covered in China’s Census. China has experienced a strong growth in patent filings over the past two decades, and has since 2011 become the world’s top patent filing country. China’s Census database covers about one million unique manufacturing firms from 1998–2009, representing the broad Chinese economy. We design data parsing and pre-processing routines to clean and stem firm and assignee names, create a matching algorithm that fits with our data and maintains a balance between matching accuracy and workload of manual check, and implement a systematic manual check process to filter out false positives generated from computerized matching. Our project generates 1,113,588 matches for the Census firms, among which 849,647 patents are uniquely matched. By creating the patent-firm linked dataset, we hope to reduce duplicative effort and encourage more research to better understand China’s fast changing innovation landscape.
Highlights
Background & SummaryPatents play a central role in research on innovation
Applications of invention patents, the type of patents that is most comparable across countries, to China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) increased from 14,409 in 1992 to 526,412 in 2011, overtaking the U.S to become the world’s top patent filer[7], a position China has since been able to secure
Because no individuals are included in the Annual Survey of Industrial Enterprises (ASIE) database and all firms covered are physically located in mainland China, we further remove the following two sets of patents before matching so as to improve computation efficiency: 1) patents assigned to individuals, and 2) patents assigned to firms with an address outside Greater China
Summary
Patents play a central role in research on innovation. Patents provide highly detailed information on the innovation concerned, allowing researchers to conduct more fine-grained analyses of firm innovation than what is possible with aggregate R&D expenditure data or self-reported innovation activities in survey data. The resultant datasets from these matching projects have greatly expanded the number of questions that researchers are able to analyze using patent data, they almost always focused on patent offices in developed economies, notably the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) and the EPO (European Patent Office) Such a focus failed to give enough attention to the “Changing Face of Innovation5”—the growing prominence of innovation and patenting activities in major emerging economies, such as China[6]. Dubbed the “Census data”, the ASIE data cover about 165 000 firms in 1998 to around 450 000 firms in 2009, representing the broad Chinese economy across different industries, different regions (provinces), and different types of ownership such as state-owned and non-state-owned firms, domestic and foreigninvested firms, and so forth Because of these attractive features, we believe a database linking SIPO patents to ASIE firms will be a valuable contribution to research on Chinese patents and the growing innovation activities in China. The automated matching program and the manual check procedure lead to a patent-firm linked dataset including 1,113,588 true matches for ASIE firms for the period 1998–2009
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