trilateral patent japan invention most innovative

Although it is the single best available measure of innovation output, patent numbers are an imperfect proxy for overall innovation activity. Firms often choose to keep innovations that are commercially sensitive a secret; the propensity to patent may also vary according to the costs of patenting; and many patents may never be implemented commercially. Patents may even obstruct innovation on occasion if they slow the diffusion of knowledge or pose prohibitive barriers to market entry. Inventions, moreover, do not all have the same value. The value distribution of patents is skewed: a few patents have a high value, whereas many have lower values. However, since there are no generally recognised, easily applicable methods for measuring the value of patents, researchers merely count the number of patents meeting various criteria. International comparisons are also affected by differences in procedures and standards across patenting offices. For example, in Japan, a different patent application had until recently to be submitted for each claim; in other countries multiple claims can be made in each application. This helps in part to explain the much larger level of patenting applications in Japan. One patent measure that reduces some of these problems, and that has been widely used in international comparisons, is that of the so-called triadic patent families. Triadic patents are those that have been applied for at the EPO, the JPO, and granted by the USPTO to protect the same invention. The triadic patents are counted on the basis of the earliest priority year—the year in which a patent was first applied for at any patent office.However, although triadic patents are in some ways easier to compare across countries, they cover only a small subset of total patents. They are also biased towards high-technology fields and thus may present a skewed picture of total innovation performance. We thus construct another patent measure as the sum of patents applied for by, or granted to, a country’s applicants by regional centres—that is the USPTO, the EPO and the JPO. This measure differs from the triadic patents measure in that patents do not have to have been filed in all three offices to be counted. It has been argued that there is an upward bias in JPO patent data, which will bias upward data for patents granted to Japanese innovators in particular. However, Japan would be only marginally behind the US even if we took only USPTO data (as opposed to combing EPO, USPTO and JPO data); Japan comes top on triadic patents and also on our alternative composite innovation performance indicator. We have nevertheless corrected for a possible “Japan patents effect” by assuming that the maximum value that the index can take, with a top score of 10, is based on 800 patents per million population. This is below the actual value for Japan of 1,275 to allow for the fact that until recently Japan required a different patent application for each claim.