Star inventors: quantity and quality in the EOB model

Star inventors generate superior innovation outcomes. Their capacity to invent high -quality patents might be decisive beyond mere productivity. However, the relationship between quantitative and qualitative dimensions has not been exhaustively investigated. The equal odds baseline (EOB) framework can explicitly model this relationship. This work combines a theoretical model for creative production with recent calls in the patentometrics literature for multifaceted measurement of the ability to create high-quality patents, extending the recent results obtained with forward citations. The results provide evidence in favor of the EOB across all quality indicators and that inventors’ capacities to create quality patents can be measured to potentially identify star inventors in a way that explicitly takes the intricate relationship between overall productivity and patent quality into account. Furthermore, the rankings of inventors in terms of quantity or quality are overall more dissimilar than similar, confirming that quantity and quality can be measured as orthogonal dimensions. This result is of particular interest for organizations and for the society: i ncentives and compensation schemes that focus only on a quantitative assessment of inventors’ output risk to neglect a relevant part of the innovation production