Boyan Han

Job Market Paper

From Frontier to Product: Venture Capital Fundraising Constraints and the Direction of Innovation

This paper shows that when venture capital investors face tighter fundraising constraints, VC-backed companies shift innovation away from frontier exploration and toward commercialization. I develop a new commercialization measure, the annual share of product-linked patents, by scraping firms' virtual patent marking webpages that explicitly map patents to marketed products. Companies funded by VCs who are more exposed to the fundraising shock increase the share of product-linked patents and reduce science-intensive invention, with little change in total patenting. Their subsequent patents attract fewer forward citations, consistent with lower innovation impact. These companies are also less likely to exit successfully via IPO or acquisition. A within-firm design that compares the same company's performance under differently constrained investors corroborates the innovation results, ruling out VC selection of firms as an explanation. Overall, the results support a channel in which tighter VC fundraising constraints redirect VC-backed companies toward commercialization, at the expense of innovation impact and longer-run success.

Work in Progress

From Invention to Product: Acquisitions and the Fate of Startup Innovation

with Katie Moon and Guanqun Zhou

This project asks whether acquisitions help startup inventions reach the product market or instead redirect or discontinue them. We are constructing a novel firm–product–patent panel from virtual patent marking disclosures maintained by publicly traded firms and linking it to patent assignments, M&A transactions, inventor histories, and SEC filings. By tracing whether patents originating in acquired startups subsequently become associated with acquirers’ marketed products, we examine how technological and product-market overlap shapes post-acquisition integration. We also study inventor retention and the direction of subsequent innovation. The project provides direct evidence on whether firm boundaries supply the complementary assets needed for commercialization or allow incumbents to suppress potentially competing innovation.

Work in Progress

Inventor Moves and Disproportionate Development of Industries

This paper examines whether local industrial specialization redirects the inventive careers of mobile inventors and thereby reinforces the geographic concentration of innovation. I reconstruct inventor career histories from U.S. patent records and track moves across Core-Based Statistical Areas. After relocating, inventors are more likely to direct their subsequent work toward locally dominant industries, consistent with a magnetic effect of local specialization. Regions with larger inventor inflows subsequently generate more patents and citations, with gains concentrated in their leading industries; inventors with prior cross-industry experience appear to generate larger spillovers. The project also uses changes in states’ application of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine to examine how restrictions on worker mobility affect local inventor flows and innovation. The results suggest that inventor mobility can amplify, rather than offset, existing regional innovative advantages.