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Global innovation networks are emerging as a result of the international division of innovation processes through, among others, international technological collaborations. At the aggregate level, the creation of technological collaboration between countries can be considered as mutually beneficial (or detrimental) and their random distribution is unlikely. Consequently, the dynamics and evolution of the technological collaborations can be expected to fulfil the criteria of a complex network. To study the structure and evolution of the global technological collaboration network, we use patent-based data of international co-inventions and apply the network analysis. In addition, extending the gravity model of international technological collaboration by measures controlling for countries position in the network, we show that that a country's position in the network has very strong impact on the intensity of collaboration with other members of the network.

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Impact evaluations of collaborative research projects usually focus on private benefits of participants, e.g. their turnover or employment growth. We study the innovative performance of collaborative research projects and how it depends on the organizational diversity of participating organizations. Our population includes participants to EC-funded collaborative research projects that are considered as key organisations behind delivering innovations. The focus on innovative rather than, for example, financial outcomes allows us to assess the transformative effect of publically-funded collaborative research. We show that the innovative potential of research output of homogenous partnerships, e.g. between two SMEs or two large companies, is likely to be higher, as compared to heterogeneous partnerships, e.g. an SME and a large company. The impact of universities on the potential of innovations is unclear. The total number of key organizations in delivering an innovation has negative impact on its potential. Neither project funding nor duration affects the potential of innovation. Our results implicitly show that, depending on the type of organization and consortium design, there are different incentives to contribute to innovative efforts and opportunities to appropriate their benefits.

The EU Framework Programme (FP) has evolved from supporting pre-competitive research to cover the entire innovation value chain and became the world’s largest research and innovation (R&I) ecosystem. It facilitates the creation of R&I networks among organizations from around the world. To oversee and manage the innovation activities of complex collaborative R&I projects, new data, indicators and tools were needed. We present the Innovation Radar (IR), an initiative of the European Commission to identify and manage innovations and innovators in the FP R&I ecosystem. The IR is used as an intelligence platform providing insights on innovation activities in large collaborative R&I projects. The internal IR tools allow policy officers to monitor R&I projects and provide custom support to facilitate the commercialisation of their results. External actors use the public IR data platform to seek for collaborative partners or for investment opportunities.