Businessweek.com’s Michael Arndt picked up on a piece in Intellectual Property Today which points out what has been obvious for a long time, but difficult to defeat: simply counting patents does not give an accurate measure of innovation. Now defining innovation is itself a challenge, but putting that aside for the moment, the IPT article shows that other aspects of the patent count, um, count for more: the recency of the patents and the time lag from patent app (or grant) to product, for example. However, I’m still far from satisfied. It’s just too tempting to give weight to any number you have access to, rather than to what matters, which may be another number or matrix of numbers more difficult to obtain — or may not be numerical at all.
But I shouldn’t really scoff. You know the one about the drunk looking under the lamp post? “What are you looking for?” “My car keys.” “I don’t see anything here, are you sure this is where you dropped them?” “Oh, I dropped them somewhere else, I know.” “Then why are you looking here?” “Because the light is better.”
Well, I can’t remember exactly where I read this, but I promise I did read that it turns out, statistically speaking, that you really are more likely to find the keys in the light…So, to connect this back to the innovation measure: the numbers relating to patents probably do correlate with innovation — statistically speaking.
