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Books
Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System Is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What to Do About It
Adam B. Jaffe and Josh Lerner
Princeton University Press, 2004; issued in paperback, 2006
"Innovation and Its Discontents" tells the story of how recent changes in patenting — an institutional process that was created to nurture innovation — have wreaked havoc on innovators, businesses and economic productivity. Jaffe and Lerner, who have spent the past two decades studying the patent system, show how legal changes initiated in the 1980s converted the system from a stimulator of innovation to a creator of litigation and uncertainty that threatens the innovation process itself.
Patents, Citations and Innovations: A Window on the Knowledge Economy
Adam B. Jaffe and Manuel Trajtenberg
Foreword by Paul M. Romer (PDF)
The MIT Press, 2002; issued in paperback, 2005
Innovation and technological change, long recognized as the main drivers of long-term economic growth, are elusive notions that are difficult to conceptualize and even harder to measure in a consistent, systematic way. This book demonstrates the usefulness of patents and citations data as a window on the process of technological change and as a powerful tool for research on the economics of innovation.
This book comes with a CD containing the complete NBER Patent Citations Database.