Monte J. Shaffer is a fourth-year Ph.D. student and job market candidate (2011) in the Department of Marketing at Washington State University. Monte is currently working on his marketing dissertation in Entrepreneurial Innovations. Prior to joining Washington State University, Monte received a Bachelor in Mathematics / MBA in Marketing from Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, UT.

An application of the Patent Rank Score will be used to validate the concept of economic development and firm value. Specifically, it will be shown that the Patent Rank Score will provide improved explanatory power over previous measures of radical innovation and firm performance. \citet{Mizik:2003} described the importance of strategic emphasis and value creation/appropriation on firm performance. In the analysis, firms were grouped into low-, stable-, and high- technology groups. In the first analysis, the firms are objectively grouped based on Patent Rank Scores. Further analysis will model firm performance based on stock returns and strategic emphasis \citep{Mizik:2003}. Mediation of innovation using Patent Rank Scores will also be considered.

There has been a call for 'new' patent data (Kortum - see Tellis et al. 2009). I believe that I can contribute to the field of marketing strategy by improving the data available, and describing its potential uses. The new data source allows for large and rich information regarding patents that can be used in many types of strategic analyses. The most recent run of these data consisted of 73 IT firms in the S&P 500. Collecting data from January 1996 to June 2009 provides over 192,000 patents with information about forward/backward citations, classification matches, and more. The programming process to run this list took nearly 36 hours as it had to analyze over 3 million patents to create the informative dataset. This is my definition of new data, and the process is continuous and ongoing: (1) All Patent Data has been harvest (8 million patents); (2) Parsed Data is currently being stored in database format; (3) Firm boundary issues [IBM, Internation Business Machines, mergers, misspellings, etc.]; (4) with an intent to do new modeling research on the patent data: (a) Diffusion of Radical Innovations (patents); (b) Patent Rank (e.g., Page Rank applied to patent network of citations) - structural and weighted ranks (e.g., classification matching); (c) EIQ; (d) Race to the Patent Office; (e) Patent Pending