VIII. Methodology

Dometic Corporation is part of a global operation including plants in Mexico, China, LaGrange, and Elkhart. This photo shows cooling coils produced in Mexico that were shipped to the LaGrange facility. (Photo credit: Deneen Studios)

A. Time Periods

1976 is the first year that the USPTO started storing data electronically. No reliable electronic data is available before then. Therefore, 1976 is the starting point of the first time period.

In 1994, Miles Laboratories, the largest innovator in Elkhart County up to that year, was purchased by Bayer and subsequently shut down. Miles received many patents, the last one of which was issued on May 28, 1996--the only patent Miles received in 1996. Miles received 18 patents in 1995. As such, 1996 was chosen as the starting point of the current, post-Miles Elkhart County.

For any columns that group patent data by time period (1976-1995 and 1996-2006), the file date of the patent was used to determine which time period the patent belongs in. Most patents take 3 years to go from filing to being issued; because of this variable time period and the fact that the innovation being patented was created close to the file date, it's more accurate to measure the patent by file date.

B. Why Counties?

Many statistical geographic areas exist, including metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas, cities, and counties. Counties were chosen because more economic, income, education, and poverty statistics are readily available by county.

C. Data Integrity Issues

This report was created with a database of all patents available in electronic form in the state of Indiana. The database was provide by M-CAM, Inc. The County a patent was assigned to was determined by the city the patent was issued in. There were several issues with the data:

Multiple cities: 20 cities are present in two counties, either because they fall on the border between two counties or because there are 2 of that city in the State of Indiana. All of these cities are small as is the number of patents issued to them. Therefore, the effect of these duplicate cities on the overall statistics was negligible.
Filed but not issued: The data included a small number of patent applications that have been filed but not yet issued. These patents may or may not be issued once the USPTO makes a final determination. However, because the number of patents in this category is so small, the effect is negligible.