Differentiations and Grading of Inventions and Innovations in Sri Lanka

Standard and quality are important, decisive factors of invention evaluation, and the generated end-result of invention evaluation must be reasonable, effective, and successful. Thus, successful inventions and innovations selected through proper evaluation criteria can be introduced for the development of the country. The main objective of this research is to create a new category-wise grading system consisting of invention evaluation criteria, by considering the differentiation of inventions and innovations for each different category, named University and Tertiary Educational Institute, School, Open, and Commercialized. The difficulties and obstacles which arise due to using the same evaluation criteria to evaluate all inventions and innovations under these main categories are avoided by these experimentally based, systematic, newly created, category-wise evaluation criteria for the above-mentioned categories. A survey-type quantitative research project was implemented and data were collected through a Google questionnaire, by circulating it through electronic media. The questionnaire was prepared using existing national level evaluation criteria of the Sri Lanka Inventors Commission, and international level evaluation criteria. Received data were analyzed statistically using the Relative Importance Index (RII) to prioritize and rank the most important sub criteria under each category, according to the calculated RII value for each sub criterion. The age wise, gender wise, and the highest education level of each respondent were analyzed under this experiment. It was found that males, young people in the 21–40 age group, and Bachelor’s Degree holders have contributed significantly. The newly created invention and evaluation criteria extracted and created through RII analysis for University and Tertiary Educational Institute, School, Open, and Commercialized categories are tabulated. The proper weightages can be calculated as percentages to complete 100 scores of 100 for every category during the evaluation. This experiment-based, improved grading system can be considered as the national level evaluation criteria in Sri Lanka.