Patent statistics at Eurostat: Mapping the contribution of SMEs in EU patenting

Previous research has shown that in the past small firms have initiated a vaster amount of disruptive innovations than their large counterparts. Scholars have attributed this predominance of SMEs to their organizational simplicity, fostering the entrepreneurial impulsiveness in which radical innovations are often rooted. Accordingly, monitoring the SME share in innovative activities has been high on policymakers' agendas. Since a few decades, patent statistics have been an important indicator of innovation. However, measuring the contribution of SMEs is challenging given the lack of business information in patent documents and the thus required linkage to external financial and ownership information. In the current publication a two-stage methodology is presented to arrive at reliable indicators of the SME contribution in corporate patenting. Stage 1 comprises the matching of patents in a patent database to companies in a financial database, followed by the classification of the patents according to firm size. Stage 2 implies additional external information sources in order to address missing data, especially with respect to ownership. Results suggest that actual SMEs account for approximately 1 out of every 5 patent applications filed by companies from the European Union.