Today, I am traveling to Kansas for The Patent Conference (aka Pat Con). Tomorrow, I will be presenting our methods paper Distance Measure for Dynamic Citation Networks (published in the Statistical Mechanics Journal – Physica A in October 2010). While the specific applied example in paper is focused on case-to-case legal citations, the formalization and method we present therein has general form applicability to all dynamic direct acyclic graphs (including the patent citation network). Thus, we are interested in discussing how to leverage our approach to better understand the path of innovation that is revealed in datasets such as the NBER patent dataset.