To what extent do SMEs contribute to Europe’s patent stock? A methodological outline for creating a Europe-wide SME technology indicator

In this paper, we outline a methodology to assess the contribution of SMEs in corporate patenting for an extended set of European countries. The methodology consists of harmonizing, matching and disambiguating corporate applicant names from patent databases on the one hand and company names obtained from financial directories on the other hand. In order to address remaining gaps, additional sampling and extrapolation efforts are required to obtain reliable indicators. We propose a method to devise such additional efforts by means of stratified random sampling. Combining both approaches yields accurate indicators about the contribution of SMEs to the patent stock of the countries under study. The resulting indicators can be instrumental in guiding and assessing IPR and innovation policy initiatives at European and/or member state level.