Metrics are very important in society and business as they save time for everyone involved to get to certain levels of cognition and determine which widget or company is better at something. Whether it’s “miles per gallon,” automobile “0-60”, appliance energy rating labels, number or quality of patents or performance benchmarks, they all serve to limit the time necessary to understand one variable or sets of variables that impact the performance of the car, appliance, company R&D or smartphone. I will note that metrics or benchmarks are never perfect; in fact, they’re always imperfect.
Falling into the patent counting trap
Patent counting, or the sheer number of patents, has been brought to the surface by some pundits as “the” one and only metric to determine a company’s contribution to technology and society, kind of a metric for innovation. Having a lot of patents is impressive, no doubt, but when you drill into what can constitute a patent, you’ll realize that it could be more about the resources that a company dedicates to the process of filing patents than it does the value and impact of those patents. An earlier report from IPlytics, shows that Huawei has “the most 5G patents”. The issue, I believe, is that readers may leave with the impression that Huawei is leading the 5G race by bringing the most patent value and impact.
The patent process is an interesting one. While I won’t dive into the machinations, it is important that there are distinctions between patents. As an inventor, I can get patented just the same for inventing the rocket as I do for improving on the bolt mechanism for the rocket assembly. The value for these 2 patents is clearly not the same.
Better 5G patent ranking systems exist
You’re probably asking, “Pat, if you don’t think 5G patent counting is the best metric, what is”? For patents, I prefer a more sophisticated measurement, one tries to demonstrate the value of a patent.
For example, the IEEE Spectrum created a “Patent Power Index,” which took into account growth, impact, generality and originality of communication patents. You can find the IEEE Spectrum methodology here. As you can see, the rankings are quite different from pure number counting methodologies. Qualcomm is #1 by a wide margin and Huawei plummets to #9.
Patent Power for Communications category
To rule out any potential cognitive bias, I researched to see if any other rankings reflected this. And there were. According to IPWatchdog, in a recent webcast (slides here), while many companies cluster in their patent portfolio size or number of patents, Qualcomm leads the pack in value and impact. Note how close the number of patents are between Qualcomm, Huawei, Intel (now Apple), and Samsung are, but when it comes to value, Qualcomm is considerably higher than the next competitor.
Patent Asset Index
Wrapping up
At a minimum, I hope I have made my case that the number of patents companies claim doesn’t necessary reflect the value or impact of these patents. This is important for more than intellectual honesty and fact-checking pundits. Some companies, unfortunately, are trying to demonstrate their contribution to the 5G standard based on the number of patents, not the value or impact of those patents, and that’s a mistake. This is especially true when the standards organization ETSI does not have a review process to control patents declared as standard essential, making it easy for some companies to game the system with over declaration.
Disclosure: Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or has provided paid research, analysis, advising, or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, including Amazon.com, Advanced Micro Devices, Apstra, ARM Holdings, Aruba Networks, AWS, A-10 Strategies, Bitfusion, Cisco Systems, Dell, Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, Diablo Technologies, Digital Optics, Dreamchain, Echelon, Ericsson, Foxconn, Frame, Fujitsu, Gen Z Consortium, Glue Networks, GlobalFoundries, Google, HP Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei Technologies, IBM, Intel, Interdigital, Jabil Circuit, Konica Minolta, Lattice Semiconductor, Lenovo, Linux Foundation, MACOM (Applied Micro), MapBox, Mavenir, Mesosphere, Microsoft, National Instruments, NetApp, NOKIA, Nortek, NVIDIA, ON Semiconductor, ONUG, OpenStack Foundation, Panasas, Peraso, Pixelworks, Plume Design, Portworx, Pure Storage, Qualcomm, Rackspace, Rambus, Rayvolt E-Bikes, Red Hat, Samsung Electronics, Silver Peak, SONY, Springpath, Sprint, Stratus Technologies, Symantec, Synaptics, Syniverse, TensTorrent, Tobii Technology, Twitter, Unity Technologies, Verizon Communications, Vidyo, Wave Computing, Wellsmith, Xilinx, Zebra, which may be cited in this article
