Productivity & Citations

There’s often an assumption that productivity gains in an economy are due to the sum of all technology developments.

This is not true.

Some technologies deliver productivity gains and others simply exploit the proceeds and have negative outcomes.

Productivity gains result from the sum of all the negative and positive technologies. Fortunately, since the enlightenment, the positives have outweighed the negatives.

Data mining the information in citations in patents and academic papers, by way of example, delivers negative outcomes for productivity in two ways.

Firstly, a lot money and time is spent in the area thereby diverting resources from technology efforts that could deliver genuine gains in productivity.

Secondly, are far more insidiously, efforts in this area can impact the types of technologies that get funded and the methodologies for R&D in such a way that drags effort away from ‘white space’ where citations are hard to achieve but also where the biggest gains in productivity can be achieved.

A smart economy, wishing to blow all or some of the proceeds of increased productivity, would be well placed to find genuinely facile means to do so that don’t accidentally become a drag on technology development and productivity.

Just to exemplify this, many universities find themselves corralled into areas of research where grants can be won and, in turn, these choices result from citation analysis.

You will never ever find a company that chooses it’s R&D focus by such means.

That says it all really.