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Currently, academic literature lacks a stringent approach to measure the extent of a firm’s digital innovation efforts (especially based on secondary data).

In a novel approach, we use a firm’s patents related to information technology as a proxy for digital innovation. Using an advanced fuzzy matching algorithm and extensive data cleaning, we matched 2.6 millions U.S. patents to their corporate parents. To our best knowledge, we are also the first to match patents more accurately and comprehensively by relying on firms’ year-by-year lists of subsidiaries found in the annual report.

First analyses confirm our initial hypotheses and we are confident that this dataset will be the basis for significant contributions in the fields of innovation, digitization, and information systems.