Breakthrough inventions, firm characteristics and technological sector dynamics

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of firm and sector characteristics on the quality of patents, once it has been controlled for patent characteristics. To do so, we perform a wide cross-sector analysis based on a large multi-sector database.The quality of patents is measured in terms of breakthrough inventions, that is, the top one percent most cited patents. Our results confirm previous results showing that the intrinsic characteristics of patents strongly explain breakthrough inventions. However, they also emphasize how firm characteristics, such as size, diversity and more originally patenting behavior, moderated by technological sector dynamics contribute to explain outstanding inventions.