Global Interdependence of Collaborative R&D-Typology and Association of International Co-Patenting

Abstract

Economic globalization implies a growing interdependence of resources across countries. Technological R&D and cross-border collaboration are often identified as the primary driving forces in the process. This study aims to holistically analyze global landscape of international collaboration and identify influential countries and the interdependencies among countries. A total of 458,381 international patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from 1976 to 2013 are analyzed and the structure of international collaboration network is created. It is found that highly developed and small countries usually show a higher degree of internationalization. However, emerging countries such as China present high collaborative influences. The highly skewed collaboration distribution indicates significant inequality of internationalization, which is indeed a hurdle to a country's technological mobility. It can be observed that most pairs of interdependent countries are neighboring or even bordering countries because of their similar historical, linguistic and cultural heritages. Several contributions of this study are summarized as follows: (1) this study first proposes the II, IA, II-IA, IA-AA, and II-IA-AA system for classifying international patent; (2) all international patents (38-year time span) from USPTO are examined without sampling; (3) association rule mining is used to evaluate the interdependency of international collaboration; and (4) network structures illustrating 38 years international co-patenting are visually presented.

The Key Driving Forces for Geo-Economic Relationships between China and ASEAN Countries

“…Fourth, global open innovation as a new emerging driving force will play a further important role in future geo-economic development. It covers regional open innovation [38], complex innovation eco-systems [39], open sustainable innovation [40], global innovation network and territorial innovation system [41,42], globalization of collaborative R & D [43], etc. Open innovation can enhance networking innovative stakeholders and regional R&D activity [44], conquer the growth limits of capitalism [45], facilitate interconnections between countries and make progress in regional innovation policy and entrepreneurial eco-systems [46].…”

Technological cooperation network in biotechnology

“…Geum et al (2013) observe that the benefits of collaborative efforts are evident and stem from the use of external knowledge, which results in diversification of technological skills and increases the pace of production of new technologies. In a recent study, Su (2017) drew on the phenomenon of economic globalization to investigate the interdependency between R&D global partners, pointing to the relevance of international partnerships, which would increase the creation and flow of knowledge, along with the expansion of potential applications of the developed technologies. Mitze et al (2015) conducted a survey in Germany to measure R&D performance in small and medium companies; they concluded that the most important R&D performance indicators are higher in organizations that make collaborative efforts, in comparison to those that do not conduct them.…”

“…Regardless of the advantages that literature associates with collaborations, one of the major challenges is the correct identification and selection of partners (Geum et al, 2013), and there is evidence that partnerships between private companies and universities have the INMR 15,4 highest potential to achieve good results (Mitze et al, 2015). As for the information used in studies of collaborative networks, bibliographic data (Geum et al, 2013) and patent data (Crespo et al, 2015;Mitze et al, 2015;Su, 2017) prevail.…”

Developing a Methodology of Structuring and Layering Technological Information in Patent Documents through Natural Language Processing

“…Lee et al [12] and Altuntas et al [8] analyzed the technology convergence, innovation, and relationship among technologies by investigating the citation network between technology fields. Jeong et al [4] and Su [13] presented the trends of technology development among structured information by analyzing the number of patents registered each year. Based on IPC codes, Kim [14] discovered core technology in environmental ecology based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) and association rule mining.…”