Post date: Jul 4, 2011 4:10:42 AM
The USPTO's fees are indexed by size. This is giving me the chance to look at firm growth DURING the patenting process. This has never been done before because only post-issuance fee data has been made available. I will look at the speed at which firms make the transition to 500+ employees and whether or not this is impacted by patent grant decisions.
I have also written a python code to match the names of Venture Xpert firms to the patent database names. This is an issue, especially for growing firms, because their names change and are often misspelled. I am also doing this in the hopes that myself, Stuart Graham, and Nico Zeebroeck can tackle the key question at the bottom of this post (actually a better variant that we will keep to ourselves for now!).
I am in the process of securing another grant to pursue this topic during the following year! If you are interested in this type of research question, please feel free to contact me.
Key Question: Patents are expensive and labor intensive... so what comes first? The patent or the employees?