Identifying Technology Flows and Spillovers Through NAICS Coding of ATP Project Participants

NISTIR 7280 - Identifying Technology Flows and Spillovers Through NAICS Coding of ATP Project Participants

KEY FINDINGS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Key Findings

The key findings of the report are as follows: the predominant six-digit NAICS own-industry of ATP project participants is research and development in the physical sciences followed by the software, electronic machinery, and machinery manufacturing industries. All of these industries could be characterized as mid-stream industries. These intermediate goods producers supply inputs to the upstream and downstream industries.

The distribution of use-industries is more diffuse. The most common use-industries include transportation equipment, computer hardware, pharmaceuticals, and electronic manufacturing. The use-industries are more likely to be characterized as downstream industries.

Fifty-five percent of participants' own-industries may be characterized as primary technology generators, while only 23 percent of participants' use-industries may be characterized as primary technology generators.

There is evidence ATP selects projects with potential for broad economic impact, based on the fact that a significant portion of proposed commercial applications involves an industry that is different from the project participant's own-industry. Biotechnology is the technology area most likely to involve the use-industry research and development in the physical sciences; this is called an infrastructural technology.

In another indication of spillover impact, we discovered that 10 to 18 percent of commercial applications, depending on the technology area, involve licensing outside of their own-industry. These are projects where technology is developed by a company for their own-industry application, but they plan to license it outside of the own-industry. This situation typically allows a developing company to concentrate on commercializing the technology in the market where it presumably has more expertise, while allowing the licensing firm to commercialize the technology in its different own-industry, where it presumably possesses more expertise in commercializing the technology.

Suggestions for Future Research

Future work should focus on matching commercialization and patent outcomes data to the NAICS coding. Then, an inventory could be kept of which industries are affected by commercialization (market spillovers) and patent generation (knowledge spillovers) and which are not. The next step would be to apply the Scherer technology flow approach and use these data to determine the technology flows that result from ATP-enabled technology. This could be simply assigning the dollars spent on each project and then allocating them across the commercial applications. This would measure the potential spillover effects while one could also apply the commercial outcomes that actually occur and restrict allocation of the potential gains to them.

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Date created: May 25, 2006
Last updated: June 1, 2006

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