Economic Value of Innovations: A New Estimation Approach

To assess the importance of technological innovation for economic growth, an ideal measure should capture the economic value of new inventions and be comparable across countries and industries and across time. This measure would also help firms gauge their R&D input-output efficiency and largely complement the measures on scientific value of patents, e.g. number of citations. The accuracy of this measure relies on the estimate of the ex-ante probability of application success. Our project aims at addressing this issue by estimating the ex-ante approval probability for each patent. By doing so, we are able to propose a more accurate measure of the economic value of innovations.