It's also a biased component. Patent-filing opportunities mostly go to senior or above engineers at larger firms.

Filing is done by the applicant, who is generally the employer of the inventor (i.e. the company they work for). Each inventor must have made a significant innovative technical contribution to the invention, and anyone who makes such a contribution has to be an inventor. Managing or employing an inventor doesn't count. The only bias I can think of is that the patent might be filed some time after the invention was made, but in my experience this is at most a few years, usually one or two. Source: I am an inventor on six patents (average age 40).

Or to private people who have money.

Guess what most twenty year old don't have?

I'd be very surprised if more than an handful of cases fall into that category. Do you have any data showing that is significant?

Vox had an article on something related to this [0], but you'd have to take an extra step to say this means these the inventors, at 20-years-old, were or weren't obtaining patents because of parent income.

[0] https://www.vox.com/2015/3/16/8225165/patents-innovation-soc...

Agreed - and this coming from a person likely considered "older" in technology (i.e. > 40 yrs). I think the criteria for "innovation" is flawed or at the very least needs to be expanded. It should include research published (pay-walled or otherwise) and high impact open source contributions at the very least.

Patents are typically filed by folks working for large(ish) corporations or universities. For corporations its almost a given that someone senior up the chain is on the patent. In a university - its generally the professor(s) leading the lab that will always be on a patent filed on behalf of the lab irrespective of the work they've put into it. That behavior in itself is a bias towards having an older population be on more patents.

The highest impact open source contributions were for non-innovative work. Linux is a rewrite of Unix, GNU Emacs is a rewrite of earlier versions of Emacs.

> For corporations its almost a given that someone senior up the chain is on the patent.

In my experience that isn't true and in cases where it did happen it would be an abuse of process. As a rule, royalties from patents are assigned to the employer, so there's very little to be gained by being an inventor that's tangible. All I and my co-inventors got were a few low denomination US and Canadian bank notes.

"In my experience that isn't true and in cases where it did happen it would be an abuse of process."

At my employer that's the case . Directors are pretty much on every patent that comes from their department.

It certainly shouldn't happen, but might happen at some places. It would be very suspicious if the same person's name appeared on, say, 100 patents filed within a few years of one another, and that person was a departmental manager.

Inventors' dates of birth aren't on patent applications. To carry out the research, the authors of http://www2.itif.org/2016-demographics-of-innovation.pdf had to contact the inventors directly, so would have been able to filter out obvious cases of abuse.

What's GNU Emacs a rewrite of?

Various earlier versions, the most significant were ITS Emacs (the original) and Gosling Emacs (itself a rewrite).

Published research also has bias. How many first authors actually did the innovating? Versus ran the lab the innovation happened in or advised the innovator. Depends on the field, but I think most people can reasonably agree that those folks are listed as authors on the publication for reasons other than having actually innovated. But let me nip this in the bud: I am not saying those people don't deserve credit for their part, just that published research has its own share of bias.

Welcome to the wonderful world of news/media/publishing. They have to publish something to get paid.

So they come up with "studies suggest" and other nonsense like it.

Wasn't there an article a while back about how you lose your creativity and innovative powers as you grow older. And that's why most "innovation" in math, physics, tech and music come from younger people?