Insightful read! I especially appreciate the clarification between “economically meaningful inventions”, which forms an aspect of what I classify as “strategically relevant intellectual property assets (IPAs)”, and equating “patenting counts to direct innovation”. As argued, “patents are better understood as intermediate outputs of inventive activity” and “even when something can be counted, the precision of the count is often an illusion.”
The analysis of patent data should be informed on a case-by-case basis, dependent on the question to be answered; because the decision on which approach to apply in the count determines the interpretation conveyed by the data utilised.
This is so accurate! I face this in my research quite often and I’ve written something similar (in terms of environmental innovation)
https://ipandclimatechange.substack.com/p/patents-as-a-measure-of-environmental?r=6mhfda&utm_medium=ios
Insightful read! I especially appreciate the clarification between “economically meaningful inventions”, which forms an aspect of what I classify as “strategically relevant intellectual property assets (IPAs)”, and equating “patenting counts to direct innovation”. As argued, “patents are better understood as intermediate outputs of inventive activity” and “even when something can be counted, the precision of the count is often an illusion.”
The analysis of patent data should be informed on a case-by-case basis, dependent on the question to be answered; because the decision on which approach to apply in the count determines the interpretation conveyed by the data utilised.