Measuring Innovation Performance of Countries using Patents as Innovation Indicators

Abstract

Innovation is a driving force of a country’s economic growth. Measuring innovation is a challenging task due to various inputs and those activities that drive innovation. This paper measures innovative activity of a selected list of countries. It further elaborates on the dependence of R&D indicators on the patenting activity for those countries. A method based on descriptive statistics is used in this study to perform the analysis and discussed. The dataset comprises patent data from European Patent Office (EPO) for 14 countries for a 7-year time interval between 1999 and 2005. Two innovation performance ratios (Inventive Performance, Invention Productive Performance) that are derived from relating patent count to R&D expenditure as well as number of research personnel in countries is used to draw a comparison of innovative performance of countries.