About

Wesley M. Cohen (Ph.D., Economics, Yale University, 1981) is Professor of Economics and Management and the Snow Family Professor of Business Administration in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He also holds secondary appointments in Duke’s Department of Economics and School of Law, is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and serves as the Faculty Director of the Fuqua School’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Before joining Duke in 2002, Professor Cohen taught at Carnegie Mellon University for 20 years and spent a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Industrial Organization at Harvard Business School. His research focuses on the economics of technological change and R&D, examining the determinants of innovative activity and performance. His work considers the roles of firm size, market structure, firm learning, knowledge flows, university research, and the means firms use to protect their intellectual property, with a particular emphasis on patents. Recently, he has conducted research on the 'division of innovative labor,' investigating the ties across firms and other institutions that influence innovative performance. Professor Cohen has published extensively in scholarly journals such as the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Science, and the Strategic Management Journal. He has received funding from multiple organizations including the National Science Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Ford Foundation. In addition to his research, Professor Cohen has served as a Main Editor for Research Policy and participated in various committees of the National Academies related to intellectual property rights and research and development statistics. He was named to the World Economic Forum’s 'Global Innovation 100' in 2008. His teaching includes courses on the economics of technological change, industrial organization economics, policy analysis, organizational behavior, corporate strategy, entrepreneurship, technology strategy, and the management of intellectual capital. He has also provided legal consulting on issues related to intellectual property.

Research topics

• Business
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Statistics
• Mathematics
• Public relations
• Engineering
• Industrial organization
• Marketing

Selected publications

• Blockbusters, Sequels and the Nature of Innovation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Blockbusters, Sequels and the Nature of Innovation

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-06-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Using detailed product-and invention-level data from the pharmaceutical industry, we demonstrate that firms with particularly high-selling "blockbuster" products concentrate their development efforts on new products that both target the same customer segments and are more likely to be technically similar to existing blockbuster products.This behavior, driven by an expectation of the stickiness of demand for existing product offerings, limits firms' incentives to invest in entirely new products targeting different customer segments.Our findings offer insights into how blockbuster products shape firms' customer segment and innovation choices, with implications for understanding the dynamics of technological change in R&D-intensive industries.

  PublisherDOI

• Inventive capabilities in the division of innovative labor

  Economics of Innovation and New Technology · 2025-08-11 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  We study how the inventive capability of a firm conditions its participation in a division of innovative labor. Capable firms are, by definition, able to invent; for them, external inventions substitute for their own R&D. However, external knowledge is an input into internal invention, and thus, more valuable to firms with inventive capability. Using a simple model of innovation and imitation, we explore how inventive capability affects a firm’s R&D investments, and thus whether and how it innovates, imitates, or does neither. Further, we study how these outcomes are conditioned by the supply of external knowledge as well as the supply of external inventions. In an advance over the literature, we treat firm inventive capability as unobserved, and use a latent class multinomial model to infer its value. Using a recent survey of product innovation and the division of innovative labor among US manufacturing firms, we find that high capability firms tend to use internal, rather than externally generated inventions, to innovate, and they use external knowledge to enhance their internal inventive activity. By contrast, lower capability firms are more likely to introduce “me-too” or imitative products, and when they innovate, are more likely to rely on external sources of inventions. Our findings suggest the successful pursuit of R&D-led growth depends both on firm inventive capability and the external knowledge environment.

  PublisherDOI

• Measuring the commercial potential of science

  Strategic Management Journal · 2025-05-05 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Research Summary We develop an ex ante measure of commercial potential of science, an otherwise unobservable variable driving the performance of innovation‐intensive firms. To do so, we rely on large language models and neural networks to predict whether scientific articles will influence firms' use of science. Incorporating time‐varying models and the quantification of uncertainty, the measure is validated through both traditional methods and out‐of‐sample exercises, leveraging a major university's technology transfer data. To illustrate the methodological contributions of our measure, we apply it to examining the impact of university reputation and university privatization of science, finding that firms' reliance on reputation may lead to foregone opportunities, and privatization (i.e., patenting) appears to increase firms' use of the science of one university. We make our measure and method available to researchers. Managerial Summary Using machine learning, we develop a measure that estimates the probability that a scientific discovery will contribute to a commercially valuable innovation. This work addresses a key challenge: the inability to observe what scientific discoveries are worth pushing forward into commercial application. We illustrate the usefulness of this measure with two examples: 1.) firms’ use of research from prestigious universities over equally promising work from less prominent ones; and 2.) how patenting affects the diffusion of commercially relevant science across firms. For practitioners, this measure can inform R&D, licensing, and other innovation related decisions by guiding firms’ search for commercially relevant scientific research. The measure and the associated code are publicly available.

  PublisherDOI

• Blockbuster Products and the Nature of Innovation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Blockbuster Products and the Nature of Innovation

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Measuring the Commercial Potential of Science

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Measuring the Commercial Potential of Science

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-03-01 · 6 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  This paper uses a large language model to develop an ex-ante measure of the commercial potential of scientific findings.In addition to validating the measure against the typical holdout sample, we validate it externally against 1.) the progression of scientific findings through a major university's technology transfer process and 2.) firms' use of the academic science of major American research universities.We then illustrate the measure's utility by applying it to two questions.First, does the patenting of academic research by universities impede its breadth of use by firms?Second, to illustrate how this measure can advance our understanding of the determinants of firms' use of science generally, we use it to analyze how one factor, universities' reputations for generating commercializable science, impacts firms' use of academic science.For the former question, using our measure to control for commercializable science, we find that patenting does not dampen the dissemination of academic science in industry.For the second, we find that reputation per se, apart from the production of commercializable science, impacts industry's use of science, especially for that science with high commercial potential, implying that the commercializable science of less prominent universities is disproportionately overlooked by industry.

  PublisherDOI

• The Commercial Potential of Science and Its Realization: Evidence From a Measure Using a Large Language Model

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Invention value, inventive capability and the large firm advantage

  Research Policy · 2022-10-29 · 51 citations

  articleCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: DAT and MOD: The Division of Innovative Labor

  NSF · $388k · 2008–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Ashish Arora

  78 shared

• John P. Walsh

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  64 shared

• Henry Sauermann

  European School of Management and Technology

  26 shared

• Richard R. Nelson

  14 shared

• Steven Klepper

  Carnegie Mellon University

  10 shared

• Michael Roach

  Middle Tennessee State University

  10 shared

• Paula E. Stephan

  TU Dresden

  9 shared

• Marco Ceccagnoli

  7 shared

Awards & honors

• Named to the World Economic Forum’s “Global Innovation 100”…