Linking Canadian Patent records from the U.S. Patent office to Statistics Canada’s Business Register, 2000 to 2011

This paper describes the Quick Match System (QMS), an in-house application designed to match business microdata records, and the methods used to link the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) dataset to Statistics Canada’s Business Register (BR) for the period from 2000 to 2011. The paper illustrates the record-linkage framework and outlines the techniques used to prepare and classify each record and evaluate the match results. The USPTO dataset consisted of 41,619 U.S. patents granted to 14,162 distinct Canadian entities. The record-linkage process matched the names, city, province and postal codes of the patent assignees in the USPTO dataset with those of businesses in the January editions of the Generic Survey Universe File (GSUF) from the BR for the same reference period. As the vast majority of individual patent assignees are not engaged in commercial activity to provide taxable property or services, they tend not to appear in the BR. The relatively poor match rate of 24.5% among individuals, compared to 84.7% among institutions, reflects this tendency. Although the 8,844 individual patent assignees outnumbered the 5,318 institutions, the institutions accounted for 73.0% of the patents, compared to 27.0% held by individuals. Consequently, this study and its conclusions focus primarily on institutional patent assignees. The linkage of the USPTO institutions to the BR is significant because it provides access to business micro-level data on firm characteristics, employment, revenue, assets and liabilities. In addition, the retrieval of robust administrative identifiers enables subsequent linkage to other survey and administrative data sources. The integrated dataset will support direct and comparative analytical studies on the performance of Canadian institutions that obtained patents in the United States between 2000 and 2011.