Open AccessQuantitative Determination of Technological Improvement from Patent Data
Author(s) -
Christopher L. Benson,
Christopher L. Magee
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0121635
Subject(s) - immediacy , domain (mathematical analysis) , metric (unit) , computer science , predictive power , econometrics , mathematics , economics , physics , operations management , mathematical analysis , philosophy , epistemology , quantum mechanics
The results in this paper establish that information contained in patents in a technological domain is strongly correlated with the rate of technological progress in that domain. The importance of patents in a domain, the recency of patents in a domain and the immediacy of patents in a domain are all strongly correlated with increases in the rate of performance improvement in the domain of interest. A patent metric that combines both importance and immediacy is not only highly correlated (r = 0.76, p = 2.6*10 -6 ) with the performance improvement rate but the correlation is also very robust to domain selection and appears to have good predictive power for more than ten years into the future. Linear regressions with all three causal concepts indicate realistic value in practical use to estimate the important performance improvement rate of a technological domain.