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from New York were invented by two people from Texaco Inc. and were related to fuel
additives or mixtures. We cannot rationalize the observed citation penalty from these
data but suggest that these particular inventions play a role in weighing down the citation
count in this geography. Finally, we observe a weakly significant signal for university
patents being more highly cited than inventions from independent inventors; no other
significant effects from inventing institutions are observed.

Table 5. Regressed and Simulated Determination of Sources for Biofuel Technical and
Commercial Breakthrough Innovation

1 Contrast Variable definitions: see Table 3.

For commercial breakthroughs, the only geographic effect that we observe is that biofuels
patents from Massachusetts are highly discounted in their commercial impact. The single
largest assignee of biofuels patents from Massachusetts is the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) (n = 4) with a single inventor responsible for all these patents. MIT is
highly lauded as an innovation and entrepreneurship center, and we observe a strong Web
hits signal for these patents—in fact, one of these patents is also the most highly cited—
so we expect the observed penalty is not from these patents. The remaining patents in the
dataset are for a diverse group of corporations and independent inventors.

There are some important differences in the intellectual property practices of different
market players that need to be properly accounted for to improve this measure of Web
presence. The observation of a weak Web hit signal from corporations may be the result
of two related but distinct factors: (1) Universities must “advertise” their inventions to
get them licensed and into commercial practice, which could increase their Web hits
measure, (2) Corporations may purposefully not advertise their innovations and, if they
are a small company without much outside interest in the blogosphere, may avoid
detection by the Web community, decreasing their Web hits signal. Determining which
of these factors are at play requires further investigation and is essential to the correct use
of the Web hits measure but is beyond the scope of this paper. There is a strong but not
very significant observation that biofuels patents from universities and national
laboratories are more commercially relevant. We do not observe any effect of funding or
team size on the commercial importance of biofuels patents.

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