I'm attempting to make a correlation analysis between a country's R&D expenditures and innovative power. Obtaining the R&D data isn't much of a problem. Getting good and reliable data for the innovative power is a whole different story, though.
My approach to measure the innovative power of a country is by counting the "inventions" that origin from that respective country. The term "inventions" is where things get sketchy - at least for me. By browsing the discussion forums here as well as further researching on the EPO website and other sources, I came to the conclusion that the most reasonable way appears to be counting patent families as opposed to individual patents.
Now, I've come up with a SQL query for PATSTAT (2017 spring edition) which - from my understanding - collects the following data and appears to work fine:
- The annual total of INPADOC applications
- by residents of a certain country
- for each of the years 1995 through 2015
Code: Select all
SELECT q.earliest_filing_year, COUNT(q.earliest_filing_year) AS cnt_A
FROM (
SELECT DISTINCT inpadoc_family_id, earliest_filing_year
FROM tls201_appln a
JOIN tls207_pers_appln pa ON a.appln_id = pa.appln_id
JOIN tls206_person p ON pa.person_id = p.person_id
WHERE earliest_filing_year BETWEEN 1995 AND 2015
AND pa.applt_seq_nr > 0
AND ipr_type = 'PI'
AND person_ctry_code = 'DE' -- US, KR, (CN,) GB, ES, IT, FR, JP
) q
GROUP BY q.earliest_filing_year
- Does the query I posted above actually provide the data that I described in the list above?
- Am I skipping crucial stuff or narrowing down the results too far with that query?
- Is my approach to pick patent families over patents viable and valid to measure inventions?
- Did I opt for the correct patent family definition? Would DOCDB be suited better for my purposes?
- Am I missing something else?
Thanks in advance!
Kind regards,
deef