Framing patent indicators for innovation study

Patent indicators are increasingly used to assess competitive advantage or technology development trends for innovation studies. There are a number of patent indicators proposed in the literature to access such technology-based innovativeness. However, most of the studies arbitrarily select patent indicators for their investigations without optimizing the choice of indicators. Only a limited researchers attempt to classify patent indicators to assist the selection of indicators for diverse research objectives. In this paper, a novel framework structure is provided to frame patent indicators accepted in scientific literature after extensive review on patent related journal papers. The framework provides insights on comprehensive correlations as well as management implications of obtainable patent indicators. It is expected that this framework can be served as a channel for innovation studies to uncover much wider and systematic insights from the application of patent indicators.