New Ways of Looking at Innovation

What consitutes a new idea? How do you measure inspiration or a moment of genius? These may sound like silly questions, but policy makers and governments for years have attempted to both monitor and positively impact the rate at which new, original, useful ideas, or innovations take place.

Why Care about Innovation?

Innovation is thought to be vital for economic growth, prosperity and development. When you think about most of the advancements of the last decades or centuries, many of them can be attributed to a single person or group of people with an unexpected idea. Think of Thomas Edison and the lightbulb, the Wright Brothers and the first airplane.

Many think that innovation will be extremely important in the future, for example to overcome societal challenges and our dependency on unsustainable energy use.

How we Measure Innovation

But how does one measure innovation? Until now, not terribly well. For decades those studying innovation have used patent applications to measure innovation. Why? It´s simple: a patent application takes place in a set moment a time, a patent is a legal claim of a new product, design, or use, which is recorded, so in theory no two patents are the same, or would be recorded twice.

The power of new ideas Ideas to change the world

Source: gettyimages.com

On the other hand…

It costs money to apply for a patent, so people only apply when they need to protect their idea or innovation for commercial purposes. So anytime someone comes up with an innovation that doesn’t need to be protected or commercialized, they would likely not patent it. Think for example of open source software available to everyone.

With the rise of the internet, a lot of innovation is being put out openly, people create software programs, and even whole programming languages, and share them freely with the world. So its pretty likely that patents are underestimating innovation. Using patents to measure innovation seems kind of like using articles published in academic journals to measure human knowledge. It is a not a bad place to start, and it is easy to count, but it would exclude everything put out freely online, on Wikipedia for example. So we thought imagining new ways of measuring innovation could be useful.

What we do

We wondered to what extent innovation could be measured from looking at people who other people think are innovative online, to see if they could be a better or different way to measure innovation, rather than patents?

The power of open innovation Ideas to change the world

Source: Max Dereta - Stone - gettyimages.com

How we do it

We used a website called GitHub.com, which allows people to show new web development projects openly online, and got all of the counts for how many people were following other people. Thereby we count the relative importance of people´s work, which we see as an innovation measure.

We thought that these ‘follower numbers’ seemed like a good thing to measure because, if people are following another person on GitHub, it means that the person is doing something interesting that people want to see in the future, and expect new or interesting ideas from them.

With a range of 132 cities in 16 countries, we take the follower counts for all GitHub users and compare them to traditional patent data. Since we are interested in innovation more generally, we also look at a few other indicators, such as economic output, air pollution, available urban greenspace, and the importance of the city, to find out whether these other indicators affect one or both measures of innovation.

Let´s look at how many GitHub users there are in different countries and compare their follower numbers for the United States, Germany, France and Japan.

When looking at the follower counts for these selected countries, we can see that many users have 1-9 or 10-19 followers, but there is a noticeable drop at the threshold of 20. This is how we decided that all the GitHub users who have over 20 followers should be considered innovative.

GitHub users in Selected Cities

Let´s now look at how many of those GitHub users with more than 20 followers there are in different cities. The user count depicted in the maps represents users per 10,000 population.

As we can see, there are some GitHub hotspots in Europe, especially in Berlin, Amsterdam, Oslo and Stockholm. These cities have over 1.5 GitHub users with over 20 followers per 10,000 population. This might seem very little but, when put into a wider perspective, this number in fact shows some of the highest open innovation intensity of GitHub users worldwide.

In comparison, cities in Japan show a relatively low GitHub diffusion with only few users that people like to follow, one exception being Tokyo. This could also be due to the fact that there are much fewer people using GitHub in Japan.

In America, many cities feature comparatively many GitHub users with over 20 followers, for example in Madison, Portland, Seattle and Austin. Some of the highest GitHub user activity is found in the United States, which is not surprising when considering that GitHub is a research platform developed in the United States.

What we find

In our research we find a strong relationship between patents and followers, but that relationship largely disappears when we control for other aspects. Hence online collaboration and patent activity do not seem to have a direct link.

In this interactive chart you can compare the patent counts to the GitHub user counts. As you can see, there seems to be a general correlation between the two innovation measures, but it is far from clear. This is why the statistical analysis also found no real direct connection in our dataset.

The interesting part is, however, that both patents and follower numbers are related to air pollution, a city´s economic output, and how important the city is in relation to the country. So, although there might not be a direct link between the two, online collaboration and patent intensity seem to thrive under similar conditions.

Implications of our Research

It’s hard to tell at this point whether we are measuring the same or a different type of innovation when comparing online collaboration to patents. Still, we do think we may have found a new and interesting way of thinking of innovation and its measurement. While our 20 follower line, or the use of GitHub at all, might not be a perfect way to measure innovation, in the future using collaborative networks and open data may be a much better way than simply relying on exclusive knowledge in the form of patents.

Want to find out more?

If you are interested in innovation and want to find out more on how to use GitHub or undertake similar research using the RStudio software, visit our GitHub repository with our more detailed research findings and the RStudio website.

Pictures taken from http://www.gettyimages.com/

The Future of Innovation

Oliver Bott and Benjamin Snow

December 12, 2014