How to measure inventive speed? A new patent activity assessment dimension

Abstract

This study presents a methodology for the objective measurement of inventive speed asa quantitative characteristic of the effectiveness of the creative process in R&D. It is putforth as an additional approach to the established quantitative methods for measuring patentactivity. The methodology determines the mean inventive range within a given datasetof patent publications. This is calculated by identifying the difference between a patent’spriority date and that of the closest analogous invention. This allows the rate and frequencyof updates to be established for the technical solutions created. A computer program wasdeveloped to automate the implementation of the method, which was then tested on a numberof companies in the semiconductor industry. The analysis identified two companies thatexhibited markedly disparate rates of invention, both in terms of upward and downwardtrends. The proposed methodology is fully automated and is not influenced by the quantitativecharacteristics of the data sets analysed, in contrast to previously known methods. Itcan serve as a supplementary tool for building patent landscapes, analysing the efficiencyof R&D processes in companies or countries, as well as for studying the technologicalfield’s development cycle.