Page 33 -

patents from corporations appear to be the most highly cited. As previously noted, the
number of collaborators per patent has been steadily increasing in wind and renewable
energy [29, 67] (Figure 6), and this trend also appears to positively affect the likelihood
of breakthroughs in wind. While we cannot currently extrapolate how multidisciplinary
the teams are [37], this finding indicates that work to find breakthrough technical
innovations should be purposefully collaborative.

For commercial breakthroughs, Colorado produces significantly more commercially
relevant wind patents. This effect may be due in part to the presence of the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory, which has produced 18% of the wind patents in Colorado.
However, the more commercially impactful wind patents come from independent
inventors: independent patents receive more than twice as many signal Web hits than the
average for all wind patents. The wind sector also appears to be unique in that
independent inventors excel in both technical and commercial impact.

Table 4. Regressed and Simulated Determination of Sources for Wind Technical and
Commercial Breakthrough Innovation

1 Contrast Variable definitions: see Table 3.

3.3.3 Biofuels
We found that government funding had a significant impact on citations as a measure of
highly important technical innovations (Table 5 for all biofuels data). DOE-funded
research that resulted in biofuels patents was less cited relative to “other” government
sources. Similar to DOE, NASA biofuels patents suffered a penalty compared to other
government funding sources. Inventor teams did not benefit from greater size in biofuels,
which runs counter to recent research [29, 67] and our findings in wind; this anomaly
bears investigation. This analysis did not observe any strong geographic effect on where
breakthroughs are coming from, except to note that patents from New York appear to
have slightly lower citation rates. More than half of the 40 biofuels patents in the group

26