How Public Investment Fuels Innovation: Clues from Government-Subsidized USPTO Patents.

Considerably little effort has been devoted to systematically exploring the landscape of government-funded innovation schemes, leaving policymakers and academics little empirical ev-idence with which to grasp the overall situation of national R&D funding strategies. In the United States (US), patents with a government right or financial interest are flagged, offering a window through which we can examine the landscape of today's patterns of government support for inno-vation. We conduct the examination from the perspectives of the leading government agencies, the promotor-recipient relationship, and the common concerns of different participants. The re-sults show that the R&D project funding by federal agencies has, among other factors, contributed to the growth in the number of patent records. The Departments of Defense (DoD), Energy (DoE), and Health and Human Services (HHS), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have issued the most funding and hold rights to more patent records than any other agencies. Moreover, re-forms to the US patent system made 40 years ago to afford more protection to non-government assignees appear to have significantly impacted patenting activity. Universities, companies, and individuals have become far more active in fulfilling government-funded projects, with remark-able innovations as a result. In recent years, funding priorities have shifted toward research in biomedicine, fields related to human life, and computer science. However, the four dominant agencies responsible for most government funding differ in their investment priorities and fre-quently adjust which areas of innovation they support. This study is among the first attempts to support the landscape of the public-invested innovation using the full government-subsidized patent dataset. The analyses in this paper are instructive in understanding the dynamics of US government funding for innovation and informing effective policymaking around innovation.