Abstract
•Patented inventions vary widely in their relative quality, however this is defined.•A framework for comparing patent-quality-related outcomes is presented.•Common outcomes, such as forward citation counts or patent lifetime, are very inconsistent in their assessment of what constitutes a ’high-quality’ patent.•The relationships between these outcomes and patent characteristics defined at grant are extremely variable across outcomes and technology types.•Neither measurement of patent quality, nor policy responses to a proliferation of poor-quality patents, are likely to be sensibly addressed by a one-size-fits-all approach.
The quality of novel technological innovations is extremely variable, and the ability to measure innovation quality is essential to sensible, evidence-based policy. Patents, an often vital precursor to a commercialised innovation, share this heterogeneous quality distribution. A pertinent question then arises: How should we define and measure patent quality? Accepting that different parties have different views of, and different sets of terminologies for discussing this concept, we take a multi-dimensional view of patent quality in this work. We first test the consistency of popular post-grant outcomes that are often used as patent quality measures. Finding these measures to be generally inconsistent, we then use a raft of patent indicators available at the time of grant to dissect the characteristics of different post-grant outcomes. We find broad disagreement in the relative importance of individual characteristics between outcomes and, further, significant variation of the same across technologies within outcomes. We conclude that measurement of patent quality is highly sensitive to both the observable outcome selected and the technology type. Our findings bear concrete implications for scholarly research using patent data and policy discussions about patent quality.
