Standards as a Knowledge Source for R&D: A first look at their incidence and impacts based on the inventor survey and patent bibliographic data

This paper analyzes how standards as a knowledge source are important for R&D, how significantly the (backward) citations by a patent of standard-related documents measure such knowledge flow, and how significantly they affect the performance of downstream R&D. Using both the RIETI inventor survey in Japan and the bibliographic information of triadic patents families, we show that standard information—that embodied in the standards and related documents—has become very important as a knowledge source for the conception of R&D projects in the information and telecommunication area (ICT), and that the frequency of the patents citing standard documents has been increasing. The citation information in US patent documents can be effectively used to measure the knowledge flows from standards to inventions, although it covers only a limited portion of the knowledge flow. The R&D projects intensively using standard information tend to generate valuable patents and also a large number of patents, controlling for research labor input, the use of scientific literature, as well as that of patent literature. A patent that uses private international forum standards as a knowledge source is significantly more cited than a patent that uses national or international public standards as a knowledge source.