Do big firms do more R&D
We are not going to mess around with my own version of this. Take a look at this Substack by Matt Clancy, which talks about evidence that large firms do more R&D, but don’t quite do it as well?
The Size of Firms and the Nature of Innovation
Then you can listen to this anecdotal story of invention coming from someone who left a big company.
Last, it may be a problem to rely on patent statistics to tell us about rates of innovation, because not every new idea or good idea is patented. The recipe for Coca-Cola, for example, isn’t patented, they just keep it a secret. The just-in-time inventory system Toyota invented isn’t patented. You can’t patent things like “this is a good location for a Starbucks” but that too is a productivity-enhancing innovation.
Clancy has another post on this topic worth reading: