Policy makers and the R&D patent relationship

Patent-based indicators at the country level are frequently used to assess countries’ innovation performance or effort. Yet they are often said to reflect the propensity to patent rather than actual research productivity. We argue that patent-based indicators can rightly be used to measure research productivity, as witnessed by the influence of several policy tools on the R&D-patent relationship. We also put forward a new counting methodology, less subject to ‘home bias’.