Notes

  1. 1 Innovation activities are described in the 2018 Oslo Manual (OECD/Eurostat 2018).

  2. 2 For this report, Table S8-2 lists the 35 WIPO technical fields, Table S8-3 provides the regions, countries, and economies covered by USPTO patent and international patent family patent data, and Table S8-4 through Table S8-42 present utility patent data. The tables cover USPTO patents and international patent family patents from 1998 to 2018. Table S8-2 contains USPTO academic patenting data by the 35 technical fields mentioned above.

  3. 3 The design classes that make up design patents registered to U.S. designers are also shown (Table S8-44).

  4. 4 Table S8-43 and Table S8-44 show the number of U.S. design patents granted since 2000 and 1998, respectively, by region, country, or economy and by design class.

  5. 5 For example, 49% of U.S. manufacturing firms reported that the invention underlying their most recent innovation came from outside the firm (Arora, Cohen, and Walsh 2016).

  6. 6 This percentage is calculated from Table S8-1.

  7. 7 AUTM collects data on invention and patent-related activities of its member universities. The number of member universities varies slightly from year to year. There were 161 in 2013, 165 in 2015, and 167 in 2017. The response rate of the survey in 2017 was 61.9% (AUTM 2018).

  8. 8 These are measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (Soloveichik and Wasshausen 2013) and tabulated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as part of its measurement of productivity.

  9. 9 PitchBook classifies venture-backed firms based on their primary industry. See Table S8-63 for a description of PitchBook’s industry and technology classification. PitchBook further classifies these industries into technology-focused groups, such as health technology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.

  10. 10 The Oslo Manual was revised in 2018. The data included in this report, however, were gathered under the guidance of the 2005 Oslo Manual.