Is there a secular decline in disruptive patents? Correcting for measurement bias

Understand

Despite tremendous growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, the popular press has recently raised concerns that disruptive innovation is slowing.

• These dire prognoses were driven in part by Park et al.
• (2023), a Nature publication that uses decades of data and millions of observations coupled with a novel quantitative metric (the CD index) that characterizes innovation in science and technology as either consolidating or disruptive.
• We challenge the Park et al.