Non-unilateral patents: A novel indicator for assessing innovation performance

Mainstream patent indicators focus on inventions protected in large economies, but the world economic landscape has changed so much that their legitimacy has been questioned. Therefore, we propose the concept of non-unilateral patents, defined as patents filed simultaneously at two or more national/regional patent offices and granted in at least one of these offices. Compared with existing indicators (e.g., IP5 patents, triadic patents, and overseas patents), this indicator improves statistical efficiency while reducing the impact of home bias based on single-country patent applications and filtering out relatively low-value patents. More importantly, a significant advantage of the novel indicator is that it improves the visibility of different economies in globalization and can better adapt to the dynamic world landscape.