"...patent issuance is a poor measure of innovation. Patenting is strictly a metric of invention. Innovation is such a vastly different endeavour—in terms of investment, time and the human resources required—as to be virtually unrelated to invention."
I whish more people recognizes this is the case. Unfortunately it is still common practice to include patents as a metric of innovation, often with the justification that we don't have any better. Since it is very unclear whether patents are positively, negatively or not correlated to innovation it would be equally justified to include any other random indicator as a metric of innovation. For example the share of population being left-handed with blue eyes and dark hair.
Read the whole article of The Economist here
Image: Jac Depczyk
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