Patents as a proxy for innovation

There is a strong link between innovations, patents and technologies. Innovations are the commercialization of inventions, i.e. novel technological solutions. To allow for their appropriation, intellectual property regimes such as patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets are used to protect different parts of firms’ proprietary knowledge. Among these, patents serve as temporary exclusive rights that allow their owners to exclude others from making, buying, or selling products and services that are based on the patent-protected inventions.

Further, patents are the predominant intellectual property right, as they protect functions and studies show that about 80 percent of all inventions are patent protected. To top it all off, patent data is publicly available from patent offices, which makes it a trustworthy source of innovation information.

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