Wesley Cohen

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…

Research topics

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

Selected publications

• Not in the Job Description: The Commercial Activities of Academic Scientists and Engineers

  Management Science · 2020 · 59 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Scholarly work seeking to understand academics’ commercial activities often draws on abstract notions of the academic reward system and the representative scientist. Few scholars have examined whether and how scientists’ motives to engage in commercial activities differ across fields. Similarly, efforts to understand academics’ choices have focused on three self-interested motives—recognition, challenge, and money—ignoring the potential role of the desire to have an impact on others. Using panel…

  PublisherDOI

• Invention value, inventive capability and the large firm advantage

  Research Policy · 2022-10-29 · 51 citations

  articleCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Invention Value, Inventive Capability and the Large Firm Advantage

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2022-07-06 · 47 citations

  article

  Do large firms produce more valuable inventions, and if so, why? After confirming that large firms indeed produce more valuable inventions, we consider two possible sources: a superior ability to invent, or a superior ability to extract value from their inventions. We develop a simple model that discriminates between the two explanations. Using a sample of 3,110 public corporations, and measures of both patent quality and patent value, we find that, while average invention value rises with size,…

  PublisherDOI

• Research Tool Patenting and Licensing and Biomedical Innovation

  Neuroscience · 2018-06-29 · 45 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Over the last two decades changes in technology and policy have altered the landscape of drug discovery. These changes have led to concerns that the patent system may be creating difficulties for those trying to do research in biomedical fields. Using interviews and archival data, we examine the changes in patenting in recent years and how these have affected innovation in pharmaceuticals and related biotech industries. We find that there has in fact been an increase in patents on the inputs to…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Invention Value, Inventive Capability and the Large Firm Advantage

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022 · 35 citations

  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”…

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