Abstract
Since Schumpeter’s (The theory of economic development, 1934) seminal work on economic development, innovation is considered as one of the main drivers of firm performance and economic growth. At the same time, technological innovations vary considerably in terms of impact with only a minority of new inventions contributing significantly to technological progress and economic growth. More recently a number of indicators derived from patent documents have been advanced to capture the nature and impact of technological inventions. In this paper, we compare and validate these indicators within the field of biotechnology. An extensive analysis of the recent history of biotechnology allows us to identify the most important inventions (n = 214) that shaped the field of biotechnology in the time period 1976–2001. A considerable number of these inventions have been patented between 1976 and 2001 (n = 117, 55 %). For all USPTO biotech patents filed between 1976 and 2001 (n = 84,119), relevant indicators have been calculated. In a subsequent step, we assess which indicators allow us to distinguish between the most important patented inventions and their less influential counterparts by means of logistic regression models. Our findings show that the use of multiple, complementary indicators provides the most comprehensive picture. In addition, it is clear that ex-post indicators reflecting impact and value outperform ex-ante indicators reflecting the nature and novelty of the invention in terms of precision and recall.
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Notes
To calculate the overlap score between patents A and B, the number of overlapping backward citations of A and B is divided by the total number of backward citations of A and/or B. Only citations to patents granted in a year before the minimum grant year of A and B are taken into account.
A patent with three technology subclasses A, B and C has three pairwise subclass combinations AB, AC and BC. A novel pairwise subclass combination is identified as the first patent in history with the particular pairwise combination of technology subclasses.
A bias correction is necessary because not all patents have the same number of backward and forward citations.
Note that more conservatively defined outliers are also less conservatively defined outliers. For instance, a patent which is a 5 SD outlier is also a 1 and 2 SD outlier.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the seminar participants at the path-breaking innovation conference in Milan (June 2012) for useful comments. Sam Arts acknowledges financial support from the Science Foundation Flanders (FWO). Francesco Appio acknowledges financial support from the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) framework program for the Grant COST-STSM-ISO604-8891.
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Arts, S., Appio, F.P. & Van Looy, B. Inventions shaping technological trajectories: do existing patent indicators provide a comprehensive picture?. Scientometrics 97, 397–419 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1045-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1045-1