Abstract
This study proposes a methodological approach to investigate cross-country creativity/knowledge flows by analyzing patent citation networks, taking the aircraft, aviation and cosmonautics (AAC) industry as a case study. It aims at shedding some light on the following research questions: (a) how cross-country creative/learning flows can be investigated; (b) have countries of current patent owners benefited from patent acquisitions. In fact, despite the well-established economic interest for (analyzing and forecasting) innovation trajectories, this research area is still unexplored, thus, motivating the need for such study. Over 43,000,000 patents have been analyzed whereby: (a) owners have performed cross-country patent acquisitions; (b) acquired patents (granted within 2005–2009) are cited by subsequent patents (2010–2015). Methodology and results are scalable to other industries and can be exploited by managers and policy makers to: (a) help firms forecasting innovation trajectories; (b) support governments in designing/implementing measures nurturing patented innovations in industries deemed relevant to national interest.
Highlights
Patent citations and the corresponding networks have widely been used to understand whether and how beneficial knowledge flows were in terms of both scope and intensity of knowledge diffusion (Breschi et al, 2005; Griliches, 1990; Hall et al, 2005; Harhoff et al, 1999; Lanjouw & Schankerman, 2004; OECD, 1994; Trajtenberg, 1990), whilst creativity flows have not been considered at all in the extant literature on patent citations
Since our study focuses on technological fields relevant to the aircraft, aviation and cosmonautics (AAC) industry—i.e. class B64 based on both the International Patent Classification (IPC) and Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC), it ensures that procedural and technology classification issues do not affect our analysis, coherently with validated approaches in literature (Duguet & MacGarvie, 2005; Jaffe et al, 2000)
The “learning-byacquisition” effect is fostered by two aspects: (a) a short time needed to acquire and learn from a foreign technology as well as to develop new patents citing the former one; (b) a high number of citations achieved by the patent to be acquired from abroad. Those aspects show a high correlation with our main independent variable in Table 4, we find direct evidence that Technology Age and Patent Citation Value affect significantly cross-country patent acquisitions and, in turn, the latter has an effective impact on crosscountry learning
Summary
Patent citations and the corresponding networks have widely been (and still are) used to understand whether and how beneficial knowledge flows were in terms of both scope and intensity of knowledge diffusion (Breschi et al, 2005; Griliches, 1990; Hall et al, 2005; Harhoff et al, 1999; Lanjouw & Schankerman, 2004; OECD, 1994; Trajtenberg, 1990), whilst creativity flows have not been considered at all in the extant literature on patent citations Most of those studies refer to a (sometimes implicit) condition: Applicants of citing and cited patents are different. This work is structured as follows: after the introduction, Sect. 2 provides a literature review on cross-country citations flows in patent citation networks and the motivation of the paper; in Sect. 3, data collection and methodological aspects are described; Sect. 4 includes results and discussions; Sect. 5 ends with conclusions
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