I don't think that patents are a particularly good proxy for innovation - I've never even tried to get patents for a lot of the most cutting-edge stuff I've wor

I don't think that patents are a particularly good proxy for innovation - I've never even tried to get patents for a lot of the most cutting-edge stuff I've worked on (that would, in my lay opinion, be worthy of being granted a patent). And we all know the anecdotes of companies that patent every trivial modification they implement on standard algorithms or data structures. On the other hand, I do know at least one scientist who checks out all the patents granted to a competing lab to keep tabs on the sort of research they do. He claims that, in our field, patents are a far better indicator of the amount of effort a lab is expending on a topic than papers published or press releases put out. shrugs