From Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, January 17:
Did it take Nvidia to unlock the potential of Texas Instruments' idea? Research by Lauren Cohen looks at what happens when companies awaken "sleeping beauty" patents.
Texas Instruments secured an influential patent in 1991, but the so-called graphical processing unit (GPU) didn’t become noteworthy until 15 years later when Nvidia built its gaming and artificial intelligence portfolio on the computing technology.
Researchers point to patent No. 5,025,407 to illustrate how dormant inventions can propel innovation long after their introduction.
Harvard Business School Professor Lauren Cohen analyzed millions of patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office and concluded that US patent No. 5,025,407 isn’t an isolated case. In the working paper “Patent Hunters,” Cohen and his coauthors note that these late-bloomer patents can be as valuable, or even more, than patents with early success.
Cohen, the L.E. Simmons Professor of Business Administration in the Finance and Entrepreneurial Management Units, found that key players, like Nvidia, tend to awaken these “sleeping beauty” patents.
Companies generating late-blooming patents tend to be more established, with sizable research and development (R&D) budgets. On the other hand, patent hunters tend to generate significantly more new products per patent, and those products are more likely to serve consumers directly.
“There are critical agents in the innovation chain who search out (‘hunt’) these neglected and overlooked ideas and use them as critical inputs in their innovation and commercialization process,” the authors write....
....MUCH MORE
Working Knowledge is our preferred HBS publication, much less esoteric than the Harvard Business Review.
