Patent Citations and the Economic Value of Patents

Abstract

Over the last decade, researchers studying innovation have increasingly used measures based on patent citations to estimate the values of new technologies, which are typically unobserved. In this study we examine the relationship between patent citation counts and private economic value in a dataset in which the latter is observed. Specifically, we use data about patenting and licensing by two major U.S. research universities to examine whether patent citations predict if university technologies are licensed, and the amount of revenue they earn if licensed. Our preliminary results suggest that citations are significantly related to the probability that a patent is licensed, but not to revenues conditional upon licensing.