PlainPatent
Innovation Scoring Methodology
A transparent breakdown of four descriptive dimensions in PlainPatent's historical grant-record comparison.
The PlainPatent Innovation Score is a composite ranking from 0 to 100 for comparing historical grant records. It combines four transparent inputs, but does not measure innovation quality, legal strength, commercial value, current R&D, or a company's strategy.
The Four Dimensions
Portfolio Volume (40% weight): Total number of US utility patents granted 2015-2025, scored on a logarithmic scale.
Grant Velocity (20% weight): Growth rate comparing 2020-2025 grants to the 2015-2019 baseline (USPTO grant years from PatentsView, not application filing dates). It is a historical difference in recorded grants, not a measure of current activity.
Technology Breadth (25% weight): The number of distinct CPC subclasses assigned to a company's granted patents.
Claim Depth (15% weight): Average number of claims per granted patent. It is a transparent descriptive input only; it does not establish claim scope, legal protection, enforceability, drafting quality, or the value of a portfolio.
Score Interpretation
Higher scores reflect the weighted position of a historical grant record relative to other records in this dataset. They are not a verdict on a company's innovation, legal position, commercial prospects, or future activity.
The score is most meaningful when compared within the same industry. Semiconductor companies and pharmaceutical companies operate on different patenting norms, absolute scores should be benchmarked against sector peers. View the full innovation rankings to compare companies.
Company pages also show a letter grade (A–F) alongside the numeric score. The grade is a direct read of the company's percentile standing in the live corpus, not a separate calculation or a fixed raw-score cutoff: the top fifth of tracked companies grade A, the next fifth B, and so on down to F for the bottom fifth. Because it tracks real percentile position rather than an arbitrary number, the grade bands move with the corpus as PatentsView data is reingested.
Data Source and Transparency
All inputs to the Innovation Score are derived from publicly available USPTO PatentsView data. The weighting and normalization methodology are fully disclosed, and researchers with access to the same PatentsView dataset can verify the calculations. See the methodology for source scope and limitations.