Temporal motifs in patent opposition and collaboration networks

Penghang Liu,Ahmet Erdem Sarıyüce,Naoki Masuda,Tomomi Kito

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-05217-8

Penghang Liu, Ahmet Erdem Sarıyüce + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-05217-8

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Abstract

Patents are intellectual properties that reflect innovative activities of companies and organizations. The literature is rich with the studies that analyze the citations among the patents and the collaboration relations among companies that own the patents. However, the adversarial relations between the patent owners are not as well investigated. One proxy to model such relations is the patent opposition, which is a legal activity in which a company challenges the validity of a patent. Characterizing the patent oppositions, collaborations, and the interplay between them can help better understand the companies’ business strategies. Temporality matters in this context as the order and frequency of oppositions and collaborations characterize their interplay. In this study, we construct a two-layer temporal network to model the patent oppositions and collaborations among the companies. We utilize temporal motifs to analyze the oppositions and collaborations from structural and temporal perspectives. We first characterize the frequent motifs in patent oppositions and investigate how often the companies of different sizes attack other companies. We show that large companies tend to engage in opposition with multiple companies. Then we analyze the temporal interplay between collaborations and oppositions. We find that two adversarial companies are more likely to collaborate in the future than two collaborating companies oppose each other in the future.

Highlights

Patents are intellectual properties that reflect innovative activities of companies and organizations
The adversarial relations among companies can be captured by patent opposition, which is a legal activity in which a company challenges the validity of a patent in usually 6–9 months after the grant date
We want to answer the following questions: (1) What are the frequent patterns in patent oppositions for a given timing threshold? (2) How does the size of the companies impact their roles in the patent oppositions?

Summary

Introduction

Patents are intellectual properties that reflect innovative activities of companies and organizations. We construct a two-layer temporal network to model the patent oppositions and collaborations among the companies. Kito et al.[14] constructed a network of companies and analyzed adversarial relationships in patent networks They investigated the global and local statistics of a patent opposition network and applied network motif analysis among other things. Temporal network analysis is expected to be a useful approach in this context for two reasons: (1) the relations among companies often change over time, and it is not possible to understand their dynamic structure via the static network representation; and (2) a company’s business strategy is reflected by its reactions to the previous oppositions and collaborations, the understanding of which requires the knowledge of the chronological order and the time difference between oppositions and collaborations

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