Innovation and Revenue: Deep Diving into the Temporal Rank-shifts of Fortune 500 Companies

Research and innovation is an important agenda for any company to remain competitive in the market. The relationship between innovation and revenue is a key metric for companies to decide on the amount to be invested for future research. Two important parameters to evaluate innovation are the quantity and quality of scientific papers and patents. Our work studies the relationship between innovation and patenting activities for several Fortune 500 companies over a period of time. We perform a comprehensive study of the patent citation dataset available in the Reed Technology Index collected from the US Patent Office. We observe several interesting relations between parameters like the number of (i) patent applications, (ii) patent grants, (iii) patent citations and Fortune 500 ranks of companies. We also study the trends of these parameters varying over the years and derive causal explanations for these with qualitative and intuitive reasoning. To facilitate reproducible research, we make all the processed patent dataset publicly available.1