Matching Crunchbase with patent data

This note describes a procedure to match companies and individuals listed in Crunchbase, a new database on innovative start-ups and companies, with patent applicants and inventors reported in PATSTAT, the worldwide intellectual property database maintained by the European Patent Office. Given that neither administrative nor other unique identifiers are available in either of the two databases, the matching is based on a “fuzzy” procedure that exploits the available overlapping information across the two databases. A general overview of the resulting database completes the note.