Small Business Fuels Innovation

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I just received my copy of the Small Business Advocate newsletter (an interesting read by the way, subscribe at http://www.sba.gov/advo/) and I was pleased to see a report on a SBA study which demonstrates, once again, how small business is often the driving force behind innovation.

Here are the highlights:

• Small firms are a significant source of innovation and patent activity.
• Small businesses develop more patents per employee than larger businesses, with the smallest firms, those with fewer than 25 employees, producing the greatest number of patents per employee.
• small firm patents tend to be more significant than large firm patents, outperforming them in a number of categories including growth, citation impact, and originality.
• small firms tend to specialize in high tech, high growth industries, such as biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, information technology, and semiconductors.

Pretty interesting stuff. You can read the full report at http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs335tot.pdf