Citations or dollars? Early signals of a firm's research success
Shuqi Xu, Manuel S. Mariani, Linyuan L\"u, Lorenzo Napolitano,, Emanuele Pugliese, Andrea Zaccaria

TL;DR
This study reveals that early patent value can predict a firm's future research success, highlighting different success patterns and informing strategies to foster innovation and economic growth.
Contribution
It uncovers the dynamic regularities and heterogeneity in firms' research success, demonstrating predictability beyond cumulative advantage mechanisms.
Findings
Early patents' economic value predicts future success.
Technological value of early patents identifies future top performers.
Predictability is not solely due to cumulative advantage.
Abstract
Scientific and technological progress is largely driven by firms in many domains, including artificial intelligence and vaccine development. However, we do not know yet whether the success of firms' research activities exhibits dynamic regularities and some degree of predictability. By inspecting the research lifecycles of 7,440 firms, we find that the economic value of a firm's early patents is an accurate predictor of various dimensions of a firm's future research success. At the same time, a smaller set of future top-performers do not generate early patents of high economic value, but they are detectable via the technological value of their early patents. Importantly, the observed predictability cannot be explained by a cumulative advantage mechanism, and the observed heterogeneity of the firms' temporal success patterns markedly differs from patterns previously observed for…
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Taxonomy
TopicsFirm Innovation and Growth · Innovation Diffusion and Forecasting · Private Equity and Venture Capital
