Data for "A new approach to measuring invention commercialization: An application to the SBIR program"

This database collects and links U.S. federally funded awards to U.S. utility patents, and such patents to web pages signaling commercialization outcomes. It forms the basis of the data used in our paper, published in Research Policy (10.1016/j.respol.2025.105302). Specifically, this database contains information on awards provided by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) within the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR) programs from 1984 to 2018.The database is composed of three main elements: awards, patents, and web pages. Information about the awards comes from the Defense Contract Action Data System (DCADS), for the years 1984-2001, and from USAspending.gov, for the years 2001-2018. Most information related to patents comes from PatentsView, and some specific details are obtained from the Patent Examination Research Dataset (PatEx) or from PATSTAT. The information about web pages has been collected by the authors from web crawls. The paper contains a companion Appendix that provides additional supporting information.