The worldwide count of priority patents: A new indicator of inventive activity

Abstract

This paper describes a new patent-based indicator of inventive activity. The indicator is based on counting all the priority patent applications filed by a country's inventors, regardless of the patent office in which the application is filed, and can therefore be considered as a complete 'matrix' of all patent counts. The method has the advantage of covering more inventions than the selective Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) or triadic family counts, while at the same time limiting the home-country bias of single-country-based indicators (inventors from a particular country tend to file in their own country). The indicator is particularly useful to identify emerging technologies and to assess the innovation performance of developing economies.

Foreign direct investment and reverse technology spillovers

“…But as we are looking at emerging economies the bias of using domestic filings is subsided. This is because the home offices attract the majority of priority filings, as in the case of patents by inventors from developing countries such as Brazil, China, Russia (de Rassenfosse et al, 2013).…”

“…Further, PCT counts could be highly correlated with other counts such as USPTO, EPO and triadic. Therefore, as suggested by de Rassenfosse et al (2013), the worldwide indicator that improves the measurement of inventive activity, especially in the case of emerging economies (because of no geographic bias and no filter on patent value) could be used to improve the estimation. However, as the main aim of this paper is not to focus on a detailed examination of patent counts, we tried to stick to using World Bank data to maintain a consistency for the countries under study.…”

Technological capabilities in Central and Eastern Europe: an analysis based on priority patents

“…This seems more appropriate for our purposes since the location of the inventor indicates most likely where the technological capabilities have been accumulated (or where the inventive activity takes place). Unlike US patent counts or, transnational patent counts or triadic patent families which capture "inventive performance" the methodology developed by Another potential bias of our data is that the patent counts include filings from different patent offices which operate under different regulatory regimes (de Rassenfosse et al 2013). Especially in the case of Japan, the Japanese IP framework seems to inflate the counts of priority patents of Japanese inventors.…”

“…However, to obtain a full picture of technological capabilities in CEE, incremental technological improvements and technological activities with lower international business potential should also be considered. For this purpose, we have developed patent indicators based on the worldwide count of priority filings (de Rassenfosse et al 2013) for the period 1980-2009. By using priority filings, the results capture a more in-depth view of the development of the technological capabilities of CEE economies before and after the transition period.…”

Comparing the International Knowledge Flow of China’s Wind and Solar Photovoltaic (PV) Industries: Patent Analysis and Implications for Sustainable Development

“…and international patents (International Patent Cooperation Treaty, PCT) versus a global coverage approach, respectively [17]. The impact of these biases can be reduced by using patent value conversion rates with priority patents [55] and using global indexes [17]. China's IP office has also made substantial progress toward upgrading their standards to match their western counterparts (Ibid).…”