Patent Indicators and Technological Innovation in the Japanese Pharmaceutical Industry
Yosuke Okada (Faculty of Economics, Shinshu University, Chief Researcher, Pharmaceutical Industry Policy Institute)
Akihiro Kawahara (Senior Researcher, Pharmaceutical Industry Policy Institute)
(No.5: Published in March 2000)
We attempted to evaluate the level of technological innovation in the Japanese pharmaceutical industry by comparing the average number of countries in which patents were filed, the rate of foreign filings, and the number of forward and backward citations for patents on products developed by major Japanese and U.S. pharmaceutical companies (phase I and later). The number of forward citations refers to the number of times the examiner of a later-filed patent cited the patent in question, and can be an indicator of the technical value of the patent in question or the basic and leading nature of the patented technology. The number of backward citations is the number of prior patents cited by the examiner at the time of filing the patent application, and can be viewed as a measure of the cumulative nature of technological innovation.