Identifying the Technology Profiles of R&D Performing Firms — A Matching of R&D and Patent Data

Since the statistical classification of economic activities is not able to adequately display companies’ R&D expenditures, the aim of this paper is to create a concordance list between industry sectors and technologies, enabling us to report the business R&D expenditures not only by industries but also by technology fields. To construct the concordance, we match data on R&D expenditures with patent data at the micro-level, i.e. at the level of companies and patent applicants, respectively. In a further step the business R&D expenditures are aggregated at the level of technology fields. This concordance table also allows us to provide patent statistics at the level of industries. The patent data for the matching were extracted from the “EPO Worldwide Patent Statistical Database” (PATSTAT). The data on German business R&D expenditures are provided by the SV Wissenschaftsstatistik. The two data sources are matched by applying a string matching algorithm based on the distance between two text strings. The matching covers 44% of all German patent applicants and 83% of all patent filings at the EPO and the German Patent and Trademark Office in 2009.