Research

Abstract: This study addresses a critical theoretical gap in understanding how digital technology integration drives the growth of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). While existing literature often focuses on the adoption of digital technologies, it overlooks the distinction between technology adoption (extensive margin) and the depth of technology integration across business functions (intensive margin). Drawing on the resource-based and knowledge-based views of the firm, we explore how these dimensions of technology use influence SME growth and scalability. Using data on 14,313 firms across 30 countries from the Global State of Small Business Survey, our analysis reveals that SMEs are significantly less likely than larger firms to integrate digital technologies intensively, which is essential for realizing growth benefits. Furthermore, we demonstrate the primacy of organizational factors—such as firm size, age, and internal capabilities—over regional and country-specific factors in explaining variation in digital technology integration and firm performance. These findings challenge the conventional focus on technology adoption by emphasizing the role of organizational design and internal resource allocation in achieving competitive advantage through digital transformation. Our study contributes to the ongoing discourse on digital technology use, offering new insights for theory and practice in fostering SME growth and scalability.

Abstract: We use the U.S. patent data merged with firm-level datasets to establish new facts about the role of mega firms in generating “novel patents”—innovations that introduce new combinations of technology components for the first time. While the importance of mega firms in novel patents had been declining until about 2000, it has strongly rebounded since then. The timing of this turnaround coincided with the ascendance of firms that newly became mega firms in the 2000s, and a shift in the technological contents, characterized by increasing integration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and non-ICT components. Mega firms also generate a disproportionately large number of “hits”—novel patents that lead to the largest numbers of follow-on patents (subsequent patents that use the same combinations of technology components as the first novel patent)—and their hits tend to generate more follow-on patents assigned to other firms when compared to hits generated by non-mega firms. Overall, our findings suggest that mega firms play an increasingly important role in generating new technological trajectories in recent years, especially in combining ICT with non-ICT components.

• [Interactive graph on the most successful new combinations created after 2006]

Abstract: This paper constructs a patent assignee-firm longitudinal bridge between U.S. patent assignees and firms using firm-level administrative data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We match granted patents applied between 1976 and 2016 to the U.S. firms recorded in the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) in the Census Bureau. Building on existing algorithms in the literature, we first use the assignee name, address (state and city), and year information to link the two datasets. We then introduce a novel search-aided algorithm that significantly improves the matching results by 7% and 2.9% at the patent and the assignee level, respectively. Overall, we are able to match 88.2% and 80.1% of all U.S. patents and assignees respectively. We contribute to the existing literature by 1) improving the match rates and quality with the web search-aided algorithm, and 2) providing the longest and longitudinally consistent crosswalk between patent assignees and LBD firms.