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The Industry R&D Survey: Patent Database Link Project

The development and diffusion of new innovations are central to economic growth, and understanding the firm-level underpinnings of technology progress is important to academics, policymakers, and business managers. While many researchers have examined (either separately or together) corporate research and development and technology diffusion, they run into two significant data constraints. William R. Kerr and Shihe Fu describe how they developed a new dataset for studying corporate innovation that encompasses three important existing datasets. This paper summarizes the Industry R&D Survey for researchers who want to study innovation through the Census Bureau's data. Key concepts include:

• The developed platform offers an unprecedented view of the R&D-to-patenting innovation process and a close analysis of the strengths and limitations of the Industry R&D Survey.

• This R&S platform can, through the Census Bureau's file structure, facilitate other studies of how innovation leads to productivity.