Excerpt
Excerpt
The use and misuse of patent data: Issues for corporate finance and beyond, By Josh Lerner, March 2015, Paper.
"In the past several years, an increasing number of papers in the finance, accounting, and related literatures have made use of patent data. This growth has reflected the broadening of the topics seen as relevant to corporate finance researchers. As Zingales (2000) argued, the wave of initial public offerings of purely human capital firms, such as consultant firms, and even technology firms whose main assets are the key employees, is changing the very nature of the firm…. The changing nature of the firm forces us to reexamine much of what we take for granted in corporate finance. Not only is innovation critical in many cases to firm survival—witness the fates of firms which failed to successfully innovate, such as Kodak, Motorola, and Xerox—but it illustrates the critical issues that motivate corporate finance theory more generally." Link