(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-01-14)
Chhabra, Param Pal Singh
Inventors often translate their ideas into commercially viable new products through a sequential process called innovation value chain. First, I revisit the innovation value chain and study various innovation platforms, such as crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and hackathons, highlighting the roles and challenges of utilizing these platforms that create value by decoupling the different stages of the innovation value chain. Next, I delve deeper into reward-based crowdfunding, which provides a signal of future demand, and focus on an inventor's critical decision of reward-structure design, affecting the funding success of the product. To test the hypotheses, I collect data from Kickstarter, the US's preeminent reward-based crowdfunding platform. I find that a crowdfunding campaign's success improves with the number of rewards but at a diminishing rate. Finally, inventors seek patents for technical viability that undergo a patent examination for a long duration. I study the effect of longer patent pendency on the inventor's effort allocation to innovative and routine activities through a multi-period analytical model, where belief update about the expected patent pendency happens in a Bayesian framework. The analytical model's results motivate the hypotheses, and I test it using patent data published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The empirical tests show significant evidence that patent pendency negatively affects the future patenting activities of inventors.