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I've heard the point of view expressed before that the number of patents filed per research dollar expended is a measure some large organizations like to use to
by pmorici 11y ago
I've heard the point of view expressed before that the number of patents filed per research dollar expended is a measure some large organizations like to use to judge the effectiveness of their research departments. Because the government doesn't have a profit/loss things like patents filed can be a way for them to compare their effectiveness to private industry.
- AnthonyMouse 11y agoThat is a truly terrible metric for government entities. It's easy to get arbitrarily many patents if you don't care how worthless they are. The primary difficulty of getting a patent is not inventing something (which all engineers do continuously in the course of their jobs), it's the staggering amount of bureaucracy and paperwork required to propagate it through the patent office. Which when the patentee is another government agency means the government is paying a whole slew of bureaucrats to do battle with each other time and again in order to generate a meaningless metric that only actually measures how much time they've wasted fabricating that metric.