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3 posts
Aidan-C
Last seen: 01/30/2020 - 11:43
Joined: 01/29/2020 - 09:08
Proxy for innovation in companies

Hi,

I am doing a research project that involves looking at the amount of 'innovation' a company produces.

While a simple way to do that could be using the number of patents an organization has connected to their name, I was wondering anyone could point me towards research that has been done that uses some more complex set of rules as a proxy for innovation that would be available in the PatentsView database. For example, it could be patents with more than 100 citations, as mentioned in the most recent 'Data in Action' blog post, or counting certain types of patents as worth more 'innovation' than others.

Additionally, if someone could point me towards a way to match PatentsView data with stock tickers or other forms of publicly available company id for public companies, that would be helpful as well.

Thanks!

Aidan

Sun, 02/09/2020 - 16:26
Hegedus
Last seen: 02/04/2024 - 19:23
Joined: 10/24/2018 - 20:10
Data Rules

Hi Aldan,

You are correct to think patent count is an incomplete measure of innovation.  For example, my experience in the semiconductor space has a rule of thumb about what Intel will and will not patent.  Basically they will keep all processes as trade secret and not patent them a pure count would under represent them even though that number is large.  Conversely IBM patents everything they can even outside their scope of business and not likely to be practiced by them.  They do try a licensing model for those patents.  So does that count really reflect innovation?  Could be argued either way.

One way I thought about innovation from a corporate strategy perspective is the gauge the revenue from new products sold.  What share of the company revenue came from products that have offered less than 5 years for example.  Now this methodology has its limits also as when I was with a start up doing next generation solar cells where we had a portfolio of 55 cases in the first couple of years, but no revenue as of that time.

I would spend some serious time thinking about what you are trying to measure when you define innovation.  Patents absolutely play a role as a metric, but an incomplete one.  My first guess to your question is that you will need to add data from other sources to describe the firm behavior.

Andy

Tue, 02/18/2020 - 13:13
PVTeam
Role: moderator
Last seen: 04/26/2024 - 10:39
Joined: 10/17/2017 - 10:47
Hi Aidan, Andy lists some…

Hi Aidan,

Andy lists some good suggestions on how you can approach your project. If you are looking for patent specific data; all of our publicly available data can be found here (https://www.patentsview.org/download/). Using these data tables and/or one of the tools our team provides, such as the API (https://www.patentsview.org/api/doc.html) or Query Tool (https://www.patentsview.org/query/), can then help you to search specifically for information that may be of interest to your project (i.e. patents with more than 100 citations). 

In order to combine this data with stock tickers or other company information, you'll likely need to search for other datasets and publicly available resources that focus these areas of interest. Our team does not keep track of such information.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Best,

PVTeam