Comment on Make an Extraordinary Effort

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:05:18 GMT

Yes, agreed on both counts. Though, I think there are also other big issues with using patents as an indicator of innovation:

Whether or not you should get a patent for a given innovation is a cultural and situational issue. For example, an Open Source software developer is unlikely to seek a patent for their work, as is a university researcher who is hoping to publish their results. Using patents as an indicator might be messed up by the two cultures having different emphases on styles and methods of innovation.

A patent contains a variable amount of innovation: depending on how you want to package it, a given idea might be encapsulated in one big patent or in ten small ones. So, using patents as an indicator might be messed up by the two cultures tending to, for whatever practical or sociological or economic reason, group up or split up their patent applications.

Finally, this would be the easiest thing to research, but I'm not sure if the US patent office and the Japanese patent office use the same thresholds for minimum innovation, de facto.

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