Is there a secular decline in disruptive patents? Correcting for measurement bias

Abstract

Despite tremendous growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, the popular press has recently raised concerns that disruptive innovation is slowing. These dire prognoses were driven in part by Park et al. (2023), a Nature publication that uses decades of data and millions of observations coupled with a novel quantitative metric (the CD index) that characterizes innovation in science and technology as either consolidating or disruptive. We challenge the (Park et al., 2023) patent findings, principally around concerns of truncation bias and exclusion bias. We show that 88 percent of the decrease in the average CD index over 1980–2010 reported by the authors can be explained by their truncation of all backward patent citations before 1976. We also show that this truncation bias varies by technology class. We further account for a change in U.S. patent law that allows for citations to patent applications in addition to patent grants—something ignored by the authors in their analysis—and update the analysis to 2016. We show that the number of highly disruptive patents has increased since 1980—particularly since 2008. Our results suggest caution in using the (Park et al., 2023) patent findings and conclusions as a basis for research and decision-making in public policy, industry restructuring or firm reorganization aimed at altering the current innovation landscape.