Patent quality index for Latin-American Universities

English

Event
GKA SOCIAL 2020:     8th International Conference on Social Sciences
10/25/2020

Keywords
Ciencia tecnología innovación

Patents are one of the leading indicators of scientific progress, hence its importance as an instrument in the studies of technological innovation. Nowadays, universities seem to be the leaders of patent production, especially after the issue of Bayh-Dole law in the US in the 80s; however, in recent years, most universities of developing countries seem to focus more on the quantity than in the quality of those patents. The problem with the use of patent quantity indicators, is that most of the time, universities of emerging countries, do not have enough resources to reach the levels of their developed counterparts; and that maybe, inside the patent portfolio of universities, different levels of quality can be hidden. At the same time, in recent years, much ink has been written related to patent quality, and it seems that there is a relationship between the economic and societal value of patents, and it's technical quality; however, aggregated measures of patent quality have not been discussed by academics in deep. In our research, we are developing an index of patent quality for Latin-American Universities, using an own-created database of more than 38.000 family patents issued between 1997 and 2017 by Latin-American inventors; to this end, we use variables like backward and forward citations; number of patents per family, and others. At the same time, in the related paper, we are discussing the implications of our developments in terms of the quality of university patent portfolios in the region. Our results show that an index like the one generated could be relevant in the generation of public policy of science and technology. Universidad Militar Nueva Granada (Bogotá, Colombia) has financed this research under the project INV-ECO-3168 of 2020.