Defining a new analysis: help defining the feature space

I am weighing creating an informal analysis of innovation and its effect on economic performance. So far, I have the following data pulled; from a preliminary look, most datasets appear to have a large number of non-null values. I am thinking of performing OLS/Linear Regression. The data is grouped by country and would per analyzed per capita. Independent variables: - New patent applications(discrete) - Average work hours per week (co