International Trends in Technological Progress: Evidence from Patent Citations, 1980–2011

Abstract

We analyse cross‐country trends in several aspects of technological progress during 1980–2011 by examining the US patent citations data. Our estimation results on patent quality and citation lags relative to the US reveal the following. The emerging Asian economies of Korea, Taiwan and China have achieved substantial catch‐up. In the case of Korea and Taiwan, progress has been made in both patent quality and citation lags. China has achieved improvement in patent quality but not in citation lag. In contrast, advanced economies of Europe and Japan have displayed steady decline in patent quality, while the US has strengthened its position.

Knowledge spillovers and patent citations: trends in geographic localization, 1976–2015

“…While Sonn and Storper (2008) draw similar conclusions, their analysis is based on patents only up to 1997, and it is precisely around this period when the IT revolution took off and, moreover, we began to see a meteoric rise in both the number of inventions and the diversity of inventors (e.g. Kwon, Lee, and Lee 2017). Another important difference is that Sonn and Storper select control patents only at the three-digit primary level, but as TFK note, the results are sensitive to the level of disaggregation.…”

Place-dependence of renewable energy technologies

“…However, empirical insights on the timing of entry remain largely qualitative in the catch-up literature (Lee and Malerba, 2017;Perez and Soete, 1988). Kwon, Lee & Lee (2017) is the first to systematically quantify the catching-up process by investigating the time needed for inventors of a particular country to cite an invention from technological frontier. They showed that Korea, Israel and Taiwan managed to narrow the gap with technological frontier, whereas similar progress is not observed in China and India.…”

“…We only focus on breakthroughs which are adopted more than 20 times as to be able to apply a threshold for the impacts of new technologies following Pezzoni et al (2019). Moreover, we focus on breakthroughs introduced by inventors from United States to proxy new technologies developed at the technology frontier following Kwon et al (2017). As a robustness check, we also use breakthroughs introduced by inventors from Germany and Japan as a robustness check.…”

Key Technologies and Development Trends of 5G Optical Networks

“…The development of 5G could create considerable business opportunities [10], and optical networks are an indispensable type of infrastructure for the development of 5G; therefore, the incorporation of wireless and optical communication into access networks is an inevitable future development trend. Additionally, patents are the manifestation of industrialized technologies; they are beneficial for businesses to achieve monopoly in the technology market, and could serve as indicators for technology development trends [11][12][13]. Therefore, in the current study, the researchers identified key technologies and development trends in 5G optical networks by analyzing the patent data and using a network analysis method.…”