When innovation talk is informative: specificity in earnings calls and future patent filings

Managers regularly discuss innovation on earnings conference calls, but those discussions are not equally informative. We distinguish between specific innovation talk, which refers to concrete development activities, technical milestones, or intellectual-property actions, and generic innovation talk, which invokes innovation without comparable detail. Using 11,231 quarterly earnings conference calls by 671 European firms matched to the Global Corporate Patent Dataset, we find that specific innovation talk predicts patent filings over the subsequent four quarters, whereas generic innovation talk does not. The association appears in filing dates rather than grant dates, consistent with filings being more closely aligned with firms’ underlying innovation decisions. The results remain similar after adding industry, country, and quarter fixed effects, including industry-by-quarter fixed effects.