INNOVATION a: WHAT DO STOCK PRICE INDEXES OF IP-INTENSIVE COMPANIES TELL US ABOUT INNOVATION?

Abstract:<br>Stock prices are a leading indicator of economic activity in the United States, e.g., they are a component of The Conference Board’s U.S. Leading Economic Index. This paper re-examines stock prices and business productivity in light of the growing importance of intangible investment in overall investment in recent decades (Corrado and Hulten, 2010; Haskel and Westlake, 2017). The new information brought to bear in this paper is the M·CAM database (Martin 2004, 2013; Luse and Martin 2014). This database includes traditional full-text patent and other IP data (such as state-granted rights) and includes both explicit citation information together with implicit conceptual association calculated using M·CAM’s proprietary linguistic genomic algorithms that provide estimates of the uniqueness, quality, and value chain associations of patents across companies. The M·CAM database is used to estimate a stock price index of companies determined to have the strongest ties between their holdings of intangible assets and the company’s future profitability. We find that (a) the intangibles-driven stock price index is 10 percent higher than the S&amp;P 500 since its real-time inception in July 2015 and greatly outperforms the S&amp;P 500 over its backcasted history, which extends to July 2007; (b) IP and other innovation assets are essential business assets of over 70 percent of the Standard &amp; Poors 500 and the Russell 1000; and (c) that M·CAM’s sector-level IP data are “value added” indicators of the sector’s technological capability vis a vis “raw” indicators such as WIPO or USPTO patent counts