Patterns of Creation and Discovery

Science and technology policy continues to be limited by how little is known about the drivers of innovation. One barrier in conducting systematic studies is the lack of an objective measure for innovation. Patents continue to be an attractive measurement tool, but many questions remain about their comprehensiveness, relevance in different domains, and accuracy given the highly skew med distributions seen in different estimates of patent value. This study develops a new approach to measuring research and innovation performance using patents by examining the trends in patent filings over time within organizations and within technology classes. Within any single organization's patent portfolio, the sequence of patent filings over time in any given class tends to follow one of four patterns. These within-organization, within-class patterns are potentially signatures of specific research and commercialization approaches which have innovative connotations. This study develops several hypotheses regarding the organizational drivers of these patenting patterns and, using data from the DOD laboratories, demonstrates how these patenting patterns can be used to study the relationships between the rate and type of innovation and various quantitative and qualitative organizational characteristics.