Data Production Methods for Hamonized Patent Statistics : Patentee Sector Allocation

Patent documents are one of the most comprehensive data sources on technology development. As such, they provide a unique source of information to analyze and monitor technological performance. Patent indicators are now used by companies and by policy and government agencies alike to assess technological progress on the level of regions, countries, domains, and even specific entities such as companies, universities and individual inventors. In this paper, we develop an exhaustive sector assignment taxonomy to identifying whether patentees are companies (private business enterprise), universities and higher education institutions, or governmental agencies. The methodology that we have developed will be outlined and made fully transparent. It will be shown that the methodology proposed is effective both in terms of completeness (over 99% of the patent volume of both USPTO and EPO are assigned to discrete categories) and accuracy (99% of the assigned codes reflect the category correctly). At the same time, further improvements are considered both feasible and relevant. In order to ensure that such improvements are put into effect, EUROSTAT and its development partners (K. U. Leuven and SOGETI) have deliberately chosen to put the methodology into the public domain. This action is, in effect, an invitation to researchers and analysts to further build on the methodology and to improve it where feasible. When informed about such improvements, EUROSTAT and its partners will ensure that updates and refinements of the methodology as a whole are made available to the wider public