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Table 3. Regressed and Simulated Determination of Sources for Solar Technical and
Commercial Breakthrough Innovation

1 State designations: According to convention except Misc, which is all states excluding CA, MA, NY, TX,
and CO. Funding designations: DOE, Department of Energy; NASA, National Aeronautic and Space
Administration; DOD, Department of Defense; O-Govt, Other government agencies, (e.g., National
Science Foundation); Other, All patents that did not have government rights identified in the patent.
Assignee designations: Univ, Academia; Prvt, Corporations; Govt, Government and National Laboratories;
None, Independent. Inventor designation: One Inv, a single named inventor; Two Inv, Two named
inventors; Three+, Three or more named inventors.

In solar, we generally observe weak signal significance for all findings of commercial
importance. Colorado creates more commercially relevant solar patents than all other
states. We observe a higher ratio of Web hits to citations from government patents than
these independent patents (8.9 versus 6.0, respectively), which may be the result of truly
higher commercial importance. However, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
5
advertises its available intellectual property on a website, the Energy Innovation Portal,
which may skew the results. Determining the sources of these differences in signal
patterns warrants further investigation and again is essential for validating this
methodology.

5 DOE. “Energy Information Portal.” http://techportal.eere.energy.gov/. Accessed February 16, 2011.

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