Spread The Seed to Win a Long Harvest

Abstract

In an emerging technology sector, the generative value of inventions—its potential to spawn subsequent iterations and cumulative inventions—is crucial yet challenging to realize. This paper examines firm research publications as a novel mechanism for generative value creation in emerging technology sectors. Research publications, by broadcasting the firm’s research and attracting a diverse set of external follow-up inventions, exposes the focal inventing firm to a pool of distant, unfamiliar knowledge. In the meantime, the theoretical knowledge contained in these publications guides the focal firm to learn from and build on the distant knowledge contained in external follow-up inventions efficiently. To test these arguments, I collected data on U.S. publicly-traded, AI-active firms from 1995 to 2015. I tracked the cumulative innovation activities around these firms’ AI-related patents and the research publications associated with these patents. Analyses based on within-firm models show that, for a focal AI patent, same-firm publications not only increase the knowledge distance between the firm’s original knowledge pool and the incoming external follow-up inventions, but also enhance the volume and private value of the firm’s related, subsequent inventive efforts. This paper contributes to the literature on generative value of inventions, emerging technologies, and corporate publications.