Quantitative Determination of Technological Improvement from Patent Data
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Magee_Quantitative determinatino.pdf
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784.52 KB
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Author(s)
Benson, Christopher L.
Magee, Christopher L.
Date Issued
April 2015
Journal
PLOS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Citation
Benson, Christopher L., and Christopher L. Magee. “Quantitative Determination of Technological Improvement from Patent Data.” Edited by Nguyen Tien Huy. PLOS ONE 10, no. 4 (April 15, 2015): e0121635.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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[superscript -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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division
Terms of Use
Creative Commons CC0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0121635
