Patents and the Independent Inventor Lifecycle

In this paper, we leverage the first randomized control trial of inventors at the USPTO to demonstrate that granted patent rights provide substantial benefits to independent inventors. We also find that the nature of these benefits differs by inventor type. For financially-constrained Pro se inventors from the USPTO experiment, patents act as a signal and increase the likelihood of affiliation. For the broader set of independent inventors, however, patents reduce financial, informational, and commercialization frictions and increase subsequent inventive activity.