Boyan Han

Job Market Paper

Venture Capital and the Commercialization of Innovation

Young innovative companies decide which innovations to pursue under technological and market uncertainty while relying on venture capital for financing. This paper examines a new transmission channel from venture capital markets to startup innovation: VC-backed companies adjust the direction of their innovation when their VC investors face tighter fundraising constraints. First, I document that companies backed by constrained VCs are less likely to receive follow-on financing, and they complete fewer financing rounds. Beyond this financing response, I find that these companies reorient their innovation toward commercialization and away from frontier exploration. To quantify the commercialization of innovation, I construct a novel measure, the product-linked patent share, using company disclosures that directly link specific patents to marketed products. The product-linked patent share increases by 0.7 to 2.8 percentage points in response to the financing constraints, with no corresponding change in total patenting. The shift is followed by lower citation impact and evidence of less science-intensive invention. Moreover, these companies reach the IPO stage at a 51.2% lower rate than comparison companies. Overall, these findings suggest that greater product orientation need not indicate stronger innovative capacity. It can reflect portfolio companies’ adjustment to their VC investors’ fundraising constraints.

Work in Progress

Acquisitions and the Fate of Startup Innovation

with Katie Moon (KAIST) and Guanqun Zhou (NTU)

Acquisitions may provide startups with the complementary assets needed to commercialize innovation, but they may also redirect or discontinue technologies that compete with an acquirer’s existing products. We construct a novel firm–product–patent panel from virtual patent marking disclosures and link it to patent assignments, M&A transactions, inventor histories, and SEC filings. By tracing whether patents originating in acquired startups are subsequently linked to acquirers’ marketed products, we examine how technological and product-market overlap shapes post-acquisition integration. We also study inventor retention and subsequent innovation. Together, these outcomes distinguish commercialization through integration from the redirection or discontinuation of potentially competing technologies.

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.