No they are not. I've asked that question to quite a few well-published economists studying innovation and the off-the-record answer is always:

> Patents are an extremely noisy and biased measure of innovation; conflate innovation with a million other variables, etc. but we have all of the patents and patent applications available for free since the beginning of the time, so that's what we'll use. If you find another good measure as comprehensive let us know and we'll use that instead; meanwhile <shrug emoji>