Cnn.com has a lengthy story on the preliminary estimate by the Patent Office of a the first year-over-year decline in filings since 1996, warning of the recession’s effect on innovation.  But as the blog patentlyo points out, although there is no doubt some connection between innovation and patent filings, it’s far from straightforward. 

Writes law professor and blogger Dennis Crouch: “I tend to attribute huge rise in patenting activity over the past two decades more to a perceived strengthening of the patent right and less to an actual increase in innovations. In recent years, court decisions and threatened action from congress may have reduced the perceived potential value of the patent right — thus lowering demand. Perhaps now, applicants are filing fewer ‘junk’ patents.”

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.

If you don’t have patience for a list of ten, or agree that it’s just too arbitrary, here are my favorites from the ReadWriteWeb sponsored list (Backify):
1. Monitter: allows you to search Twitter posts by such things as distance from a location — like your business address.
2. Hootsuite: allows more than one person to post to a Twitter account, so you can easily share the posting duties.
3. SurveyMonkey [and I would add Zoomerang]: super easy, fairly sophisticated tools for building a market research tool online.
4. Milog: an iPhone app (yes, another reason to switch, but your bookkeeper will approve!) that truly makes it easy to log your mileage for tax and client billing purposes.

NOTE: While the iPhone app costs $2.99 (one-time) the others are free.

Knight Foundation, which benefited from being formed at the peak of financial success of newspapers, is continuing to invest significantly in new business models to support journalism across the country. Live chat Oct. 8, deadline for next year’s grants Oct. 15. Get to it!
Technorati Tags: new media, news, Knight News Challenge, partnership, entrepreneurship, startups

Emily Riley at Forrester salutes Razorfish and TNS Cymfony for illustrating how to do some simple arithmetic to calculate a “Social Influence Measurement” or SIM score. It’s not too dissimilar from Net Promoter Score from satmetrix.com (ratio of customers who say they would recommend you to others), but has a little more depth. You do need a “listening platform” from which to get the data: TNS, Visible Technologies, Radian6 (lifted from a cautionary comment by Thom Kennon). 

Nate Silver is the former baseball stats analyst turned poll analyst whose straightforward explanations of statistics (and the liars who try to twist them) on fivethirtyeight.com have become the standard for explanatory journalism of the kind seldom appreciated by, say, newspapers. Not sure I want to recommend making a business line out of these bets, but it will be fun to watch!

The social network for gadget-owners, supposedly for the 95% of the relationship that follows that 5% of lust. Great graphics, blessedly non-techie simple language in the site navigation and messages — but it seems to overlap some with getsatisfaction.com (for product complaints), at least on day two.

A Santa Fe company that’s made a nice living building custom search tools for the databases generally inaccessible to Google for such clients as Intel, has recently unveiled a set of specialized search sites that are open to the public: scienceresearch.com, mednar.com (medical) and for business research, biznar.com.

A good intro to uses of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. from the point of view of a smaller business that sells to other businesses.

It’s not enough that they (okay, we, since I’m in the biz) are tracking where you go and what you do, but not they/we want to understand your motivation. Harvard Business Review has a nice intro by venture investor Anthony Tjan of Cue Ball: http://tr.im/nkGe

One tip: “…a technique we used at Thomson Reuters
called the three-minute rule; we observed what users were doing three
minutes before and three minutes after each interaction with the
product.”