BlueSky Thinking Summary

Intellectual property (IP) protection is instrumental to the United States, in which collective IP is valued at $6.6 trillion.

However, how actors in respective industries use IP protections—patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets—to their advantage has remained substantially unknown, due to archaic and narrow data.

Filippo Mezzanotti and Timothy Simcoe's analysis of U.S.

Census Bureau data points to some surprising insights: companies that put a priority on IP protections early tend to grow larger in size, suggesting a link between early IP strategy and future success.

Company age doesn't predict IP activity, as might be expected, but its size does, with generally larger firms across sectors engaging more in IP protections.

This strategic decision-making highlights the role of IP beyond innovation capture and into policy debates around patent reform and economic support allocation.

By orienting to the firms more geared to hard IP strategies, policymakers can be better placed to foster high-growth enterprises integral to economic advancement, rather than take the blanket approach that assumes all new ventures have similar growth potential.