Time to stop using patents to measure innovation in universities
The number of filed patents is a misleading metric for assessing academic research
Patents offer a deceptively simple way to measure that innovation. Many technology transfer offices judge their success on the number of patents granted and licensed; universities trumpet these numbers in annual reports, to burnish their innovation credentials. In the US, the Federal RePORTER system includes patents (among other indicators) to assess the impact of federal research grants, while a growing number of international rankings use patents to identify the most innovative universities. And in the UK, at least, there are concerns about whether universities are patenting enough (witness the near-annual handwringing about the country’s dearth of graphene patents). But are patents really an effective way to measure the innovation that springs from universities?