Abstract
This paper proposes a new, alternative analysis of patent data in order to extract knowledge patterns from inventors’ collaboration networks. Indeed, moving from a basic network analysis, we provide new developments to map and study co-inventorship. The goal of this research is to provide an overall understanding of the dynamics concerning knowledge flows in inventive activities. We show how the network of inventors is, on average, increasing in size: more and more inventors are contributing to technology innovations and they are more connected to each other. We also show to what extent inventors from different countries tend to cooperate with their local peers or internationally. Furthermore, an analysis of the clustering of inventors is carried out to show differences across countries in the structure of inventors’ communities, with a particular focus on the dynamics of collaboration for power inventors (i.e. star inventors).
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Notes
There are also two appendixes in the additional material: Appendix A includes formal definitions of several concepts introduced in the main text, whereas Appendix B presents statistical facts about patents and inventors’ collaboration in relation to technological sectors (which in our dataset are captured by IPC classes), not discussed in the main text due to space limitations.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing at this important reference.
We also have access to File Index (FI) concordance tables to convert IPC codes into more aggregated and manageable technological classes or Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics (NUTS3).
For more detailed information on inventors disambiguation and the Massacrator routine used in this research please see http://ideas.repec.org/p/grt/wpegrt/2012-29.html.
See Appendix A, Sections A.1, A.2 and A.3, in the additional material.
For all those countries whose distribution of \(M_{1}\) is totally different from a more or less disturbed power law the number of inventors and filed patents is so scarce to make any investigation about them unreliable and not really meaningful.
See Appendix A, Section A.4. in the additional material.
Recall that in SNA the density of a network is equal to the ratio of actual connections and all potential connections in the network.
These results are in line with Landini et al. (2015), who observe how Egypt is one of the most active Northern African countries in terms of amount and variety of international collaborations and research output.
Essentially, \(nbh_{i}\) is substituted by \(nbh_{i}^{F}\).
This last case refers to countries that have a very low number of collaborations with foreign countries, which makes any analysis for them unreliable.
Interestingly, \(M_{2}\) and \(M_{3}\) are equivalent to E-I index Hanneman and Riddle (2005).
In the following, when X is not specified, we intend it to be equal to 5.
Appendix A, Section A.7, in the additional material, includes a discussion on our notion of power inventor and the concept of star scientist.
See Appendix A, Section A.4, in the additional material.
See Appendix A, Section A.6, in the additional material.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to express their gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and useful suggestions. This work has been partially funded by “Istituto di Ricerca per l’Innovazione e la Tecnologia nel Mediterraneo”, Reggio Calabria (Italy). The authors would like also to thank Pierluigi Decorato, Davide De Prosperis, Melissa Giorgio, Daniela Marra and Giorgio Tripodi for their excellent research assistantship. A special thanks to Davide Lanatà, Diego Fosso and Domenico Ursino for their support on data management. Any unreferenced errors, ambiguities, misconceptions will clearly be labelled as the fault of the authors by default.
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Ferrara, M., Mavilia, R. & Pansera, B.A. Extracting knowledge patterns with a social network analysis approach: an alternative methodology for assessing the impact of power inventors. Scientometrics 113, 1593–1625 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2536-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2536-2