Josef Taalbi
Senior lecturer
Innovation with and without patents
Author
Summary, in English
A long-standing discussion is to what extent patents can be used to monitor trends in innovation activity. This study quantifies the amount and quality of information about actual innovation contained in the patent system, based on 4,460 Swedish innovations (1970-2015) that have been matched to international patents. The results show that most innovations were not patented and that among those that were, 43.9% of all innovations, only a fraction can be identified with patent quality data. The best-performing models identify 17% of all information about innovations, equivalent to an information loss of at least 83%. Econometric tests also show that the fraction of innovations responding to strengthened patent laws during the period were on average 8% percent. The overlap between the patent and innovation systems is hence more modest than often assumed. This accentuates the need to, alongside patents, develop versatile approaches in order to induce and monitor various aspects of innovation.
Department/s
- Department of Economic History
- Sustainability transformations over time and space
Publishing year
2022-10
Language
English
Document type
Preprint
Publisher
arXiv.org
Topic
- Economic History
Status
Published
Project
- SWINNO 3.0 Significant Swedish technological Innovations from 1970 until now