Patent Dataset Research Articles

From science to technology: The value of knowledge from different energy research institutions

Expansion of public energy R&D budgets continues to be a key component of climate policy. Using an original data set of both scientific articles and patents pertaining to three alternative energy technologies (biofuels, solar and wind energy), this paper provides new evidence on the flows of knowledge between university, private sector, and government research. Better understanding of the value of knowledge from these institutions can help decision makers target R&D funds where they are most likely to be successful. I use citation data from both scientific articles and patents to answer two questions. First, what information is most useful to the development of new technology? Does high quality science lead to applied technology development? I find that this is the case, as those articles most highly cited by other scientific articles are also more likely to be cited by future patents. Second, which institutions produce the most valuable research? Are there differences across technologies? Research performed at government institutions appears to play an important translational role linking basic and applied research, as government articles are more likely to be cited by patents than any other institution, including universities. Universities play a less important role in wind research than for solar and biofuels, suggesting that wind energy research is at a more applied stage where commercialization and final product development is more important than basic research.

Contextual Knowledge and Ethnic Migrant Inventors

We study the role of ethnic Chinese/Indian migrant inventors in transferring contextual knowledge across borders and the role of ethnic networks in further disseminating such knowledge. Using a unique dataset of herbal patents filed in the United States by western firms and universities, we test whether contextual knowledge is codified in the west by ethnic migrant inventors and spread by their ethnic networks. Our identification comes from an exogenous shock to the quota of H1B visas, and a list of institutions that were exempted from the shock. We generate a control group of non-herbal patents that have similar medicinal purposes as our herbal patents through textual matching. Using this framework, we estimate a triple differences equation, and find that herbal patents are likely to be filed by Chinese/Indian migrant inventors and are likely to be initially cited by other Chinese/Indian inventors. We also find that Chinese/Indian migrant inventors are likely to engage in arbitraging their prior knowledge, while inventors from other ethnic backgrounds are likely to engage in knowledge recombination

Dynamics of Waste-to-Energy Incineration Innovation Networks—A Social Network Analysis

ABSTRACTThe amount of municipal solid waste in China is increasing at an unprecedented pace. This is due to continued urbanization and improved standards of living. Waste-to-energy (WTE) incineration technologies offer viable and potentially profitable solutions. Many innovative WTE technologies have emerged in the past decade. This study uses network theory and social network analysis to investigate the evolution of social network structures for WTE technologies considering global network properties, major actors' centrality and collaboration relationships. Using a dataset of patents pertaining to waste heat during the period 2006-2015, this study finds that the overall WTE innovation network exhibits qualities of a Barabasi-Albert (BA) scale-free network with minority organizations linking to abundant organizations. Many of the major participants are involved in WTE research and have developed collaborative relationships. Their innovation network has social network characteristics and is similar to indu...

The dynamics of technological partners: a social network perspective

ABSTRACTThe selection and establishment of research partners is increasingly important in innovation and strategic research. Using a panel dataset of patents by 2846 researchers from a large US biotechnology company between 1976 and 2013, we examined the relationships between spanning structural holes and partner dynamics, which are captured by the entry of new partners and the persistence of existing partners. Then, we tested the possible moderating effect of dynamic exploratory ability. Based on the results of negative binomial regression models with fixed effects in the longitudinal design, we found that spanning structural holes was negatively associated with the entry of new partners and positively associated with the persistence of existing partners. Furthermore, exploratory ability positively moderated these relationships. Aside from having managerial implications for innovators, the findings of our interdisciplinary study are relevant for research on partner dynamics, strategy research, and exploration processes.

From fossil fuels to renewables: The role of electricity storage

Electricity storage represents a solution to curb carbon emissions by enabling more use of intermittent renewable energy. Our goal is to empirically analyze the determinants of innovation in electricity storage and its role in fostering technological innovations in renewable and conventional electricity generation. Using a global firm-level data set of electricity patents from 1963 to 2011, we find that better electricity storage promotes innovation not only in renewable energy but also in conventional technologies. Specifically, our estimates show that an additional storage patent increases the probability to apply for patents in renewable energy and efficiency-improving fossil fuel technologies two years from now by 1.09% and 0.65%, respectively. This implies that improved electricity storage technologies can boost the energy efficiency of conventional, fossil fuel-fired power plants as well as increase the use of renewable electricity. Thus, the ability of electricity storage to curb carbon emissions depends on: the competitiveness of renewable energy against conventional electricity generation, and conventional power generation mix as storage increases fossil-fuel efficiency and reduces ramping costs.

The Diffusion of Military Technology

The impact of national defense research and development spending on overall innovation depends on the extent to which the knowledge and technologies generated by defense funding diffuse. This article uses an original data-set of patents assigned to defense-servicing organizations to investigate the diffusion of military technologies. Contrary to the predictions of the prevailing scholarship, I find no difference in the rate of diffusion between civilian and military technologies. Neither do military technologies assigned to government agencies diffuse at different rates than those assigned to firms. The overall technological experience of the patent assignee is found to be a positive predictor of the diffusion of military technologies. The effect of the prevailing intellectual property rights regime is ambivalent: when US patents are included in the sample, the effect of patent protection is positive, when the US is excluded, the effect is either non-significant or negative depending on the model specification that is utilized.

Combining valuable inventions: exploring the impact of prior invention value on the performance of subsequent inventions

Innovation research widely acknowledges that most inventions are recombinations of existing ideas and technologies. Following this stream of research, this study analyses how the values of prior inventions used to develop a subsequent invention influence the value of the new invention. Building on evolutionary theory and research on technological search and technological paradigms, this article proposes a positive relationship between prior inventions’ value and subsequent invention value. The analysis of a large-scale patent data set of pharmaceutical and semiconductor firms largely confirms this notion; however, it also shows that the effect weakens when prior inventions are of “higher” value. Valuable prior inventions are also positively related to the likelihood that subsequent inventions are “breakthroughs”; however, while this effect also decreases when prior inventions hold higher values, the decreasing effect occurs only at particularly high levels of prior invention value. In contrast, combining valuable inventions limits the likelihood of generating poor invention outcomes value. In summary, while the results lend support to theories of evolutionary and cumulative technological progress, they also show that despite the recombination potential of technical knowledge, there are practical limits to the benefits of valuable inputs.

Dissertation Executive Summary: Fuel of Interest and Fire of Genius: Essays on the Economic History of Innovation

In this dissertation, I use historical patent data and natural experiments to show how policies and institutions affect invention. Chapter 1 shows that establishing new colleges causes 33% more patents per year in places that get a college, but few of these additional patents come from the college's graduates. Chapter 2 uses alcohol prohibition to show that informal social interactions are important for invention: shuttering saloons decreased patenting by 15%. The effect is strongest immediately after prohibition begins. Chapter 3 plots demographic trends of inventors; blacks and females are persistently underrepresented. Chapter 4 describes several historical patent datasets in detail.

From Ideas to Trade

This paper studies how cross-country differences in the allocation of technology affect bilateral trade. Do both the stock and dispersion of technology matter for exports? We build on Eaton and Kortum (2002) and develop a Ricardian model where the process of innovation determines both the stock and dispersion of technology in each country. Like in the EK model, a higher stock of technology and lower relative input costs foster exports. Unlike in the EK model, a country's overall comparative advantage depends on the country-specific dispersion of technology which governs the advantage of having lower input costs. In particular, a smaller technological dispersion benefits countries with lower input costs since trade is determined by these and not technological differences. The opposite is true for a high dispersion. To test our model we create a novel dataset of historical patents and use these to construct our technology variables. Our results confirm our model's predictions and indicate that technological innovation matters for trade through both the stock of patents and their dispersion across the economy.

Global connectivity and the evolution of industrial clusters: From tires to polymers in Northeast Ohio

Industrial clusters are a critical component of the competitive viability of economies around the world. However, clusters are not static but evolve in response to technology and competition. This process has garnered interest from scholars and from practitioners, with the focus primarily on local linkages and networks. Although global knowledge ties have the potential to fuel innovation, scant attention has been given to global knowledge connectivity in the context of cluster evolution. We analyze a comprehensive 30-year patent dataset (1975–2005) associated with the Akron industrial cluster in Northeast Ohio. The results also show that innovation in the cluster has survived in spite of a long-term decline in manufacturing activity and employment. The survival of innovation in the Akron cluster is driven by increasing specialization at the local level with an emphasis on technologies rather than products and growing connectedness to global innovation systems. A key implication of our study is the importance of anchor tenant multinational enterprises and research institutions in ensuring the persistence of local innovation through two key processes (a) orchestrating knowledge networks; and (b) spawning startup activity. We provide support for recent work in industrial marketing suggesting that network evolution has both deterministic and strategic aspects.

A Trend Analysis Method for IoT Technologies Using Patent Dataset with Goal and Approach Concepts

With the recent tremendous advances in Internet of Things (IoT), analyzing technology trends and providing high quality services also play an important role in analyzing big data. Patent data has been on the rise, and the importance of patents also has been increasing to demand a company's competitiveness and to claim technology rights since patents contain important feature technologies that can be used to analyzing new technology trends and to find competitor companies or technologies. Especially IoT techniques are evolving rapidly and a number of new technologies have emerged. Hence a variety of analysis techniques on inventions patented by specific companies are required. In this paper, a trend analysis method is proposed to extract patterns from patent dataset using ETI relations. The experiment results based on the real patent dataset of IoT domain invented a specific organization show that the characteristics of the organization that have the expansion relations is 98.6 % and the transition relations is 1.4 % among ETI relations. Furthermore, we verify proposed dictionaries are useful for enhancing the accuracy to extract ETI relations from a patent network automatically.

Inter-, Intra-, and Extra-Chunk Pre-Ordering for Statistical Japanese-to-English Machine Translation

A rule-based pre-ordering approach is proposed for statistical Japanese-to-English machine translation using the dependency structure of source-side sentences. A Japanese sentence is pre-ordered to an English-like order at the morpheme level for a statistical machine translation system during the training and decoding phase to resolve the reordering problem. In this article, extra-chunk pre-ordering of morphemes is proposed, which allows Japanese functional morphemes to move across chunk boundaries. This contrasts with the intra-chunk reordering used in previous approaches, which restricts the reordering of morphemes within a chunk. Linguistically oriented discussions show that correct pre-ordering cannot be realized without extra-chunk movement of morphemes. The proposed approach is compared with five rule-based pre-ordering approaches designed for Japanese-to-English translation and with a language independent statistical pre-ordering approach on a standard patent dataset and on a news dataset obtained by crawling Internet news sites. Two state-of-the-art statistical machine translation systems, one phrase-based and the other hierarchical phrase-based, are used in experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the compared approaches on automatic reordering measures (Kendall’s τ, Spearman’s ρ, fuzzy reordering score, and test set RIBES) and on the automatic translation precision measure of test set BLEU score.

From Fossil Fuels to Renewables: The Role of Electricity Storage

We analyze the role of electricity storage for technological innovations in electricity generation. We propose a directed technological change model of the electricity sector, where innovative firms develop better electricity storage solutions, which affect not only the relative competitiveness between renewable and nonrenewable electricity sources but also the ease with which they can be substituted. Using a global firm-level data set of electricity patents from 1963 to 2011, we empirically analyze the determinants of innovation in electricity generation, and the role of storage in directing innovation. Our results show that electricity storage increases innovation not only in renewables but also in conventional technologies. This implies that efforts to increase innovation in storage can benefit conventional, fossil fuel-fired electricity plants as well as increasing the use of renewable electricity.

Invention and Diffusion of Water Supply and Water Efficiency Technologies: Insights from a Global Patent Dataset

This paper identifies over 50,000 patents filed worldwide in various water-related technologies between 1990 and 2010, distinguishing between those related to availability (supply) and conservation (demand) technologies. Patenting activity is analyzed — including inventive activity by country and technology, international diffusion of such water-related technologies, and international collaboration in technology development. Three results stand out from our analysis. First, although inventive activity in water-related technologies has been increasing over the last two decades, this growth has been disproportionately concentrated on supply-side technologies. Second, whilst 80% of water-related invention occurs worldwide in countries with low or moderate water scarcity, several countries with absolute or chronic water scarcity are relatively specialized in water efficiency technologies. Finally, although we observe a positive association between water scarcity and local filings of water patents, some countries with high water availability, in particular Switzerland or Norway, nevertheless appear as significant markets for water-efficiency technologies. This suggests that drivers other than local demand, like regulation and social and cultural factors, play a role in explaining the global flows of technologies.

GeTFIRST: ontology-based keyword search towards semantic disambiguation

Purpose – This paper aims to improve the semantic-disambiguation capability of an information-retrieval system by taking advantages of a well-crafted classification tree. The unstructured nature and sheer volume of information accessible over networks have made it drastically difficult for users to seek relevant information. Many information-retrieval methods have been developed to address this problem, and keyword-based approach is amongst the most common approach. Such an approach is often inadequate to cope with the conceptualization associated with user needs and contents. This brings about the problem of semantic ambiguation that refers to the disagreement in meaning of terms between involving parties of a communication due to polysemy, leading to increased complexity and lesser accuracy in information integration, migration, retrieval and other related activities. Design/methodology/approach – A novel ontology-based search approach, named GeTFIRST (short for Graph-embedded Tree Fostering Information Retrieval SysTem), is proposed to disambiguate keywords semantically. The contribution is twofold. First, a search strategy is proposed to prune irrelevant concepts for accuracy improvement using our Graph-embedded Tree (GeT)-based ontology. Second, a path-based ranking algorithm is proposed to incorporate and reward the content specificity. Findings – An empirical evaluation was performed on United States Patent And Trademark Office (USPTO) patent datasets to compare our approach with full-text patent search approaches. The results showed that GeTFIRST handled the ambiguous keywords with higher keyword-disambiguation accuracy than traditional search approaches. Originality/value – The search approach of this paper copes with the semantic ambiguation by using our proposed GeT-based ontology and a path-based ranking algorithm.

Knowledge Adaptability Evaluation in View of Patent Citation in Technological Evolutionary Process: A Case Study of Fuel Cell

This work uses patents as agent and proposes the concept of knowledge adaptation factor in view of the objective law of survival of the fittest in technological evolutionary process. Knowledge genetic decomposition of a patent citation network is executed based on the Mendel law. And the contributions of early patents on current patents along patent citations are quantified to evaluate knowledge adaptability. Then the feasibility and effectiveness of the knowledge adaptability evaluation method are verified with the case study of fuel cell. This study collects 3054 patents related to fuel cell which were granted between 1873 to 2002 from the database of United States Patent and Trademark Office, queries from the patent data set of National Bureau of Economic Research to get 14214 patent citations, and uses the network analysis software Pajek to build the patent citation network. The results of the knowledge adaptability evaluation of fuel cell reflect that the knowledge dissemination process is composed of knowledge inheritance, knowledge innovation and knowledge recombinant. The patents whose knowledge adaptation factors are relatively high are subordinate to the technological evolutionary process of fuel cell. It is consistent with the central idea of knowledge adaptation factor, which is technological-evolution-oriented.

Right person in the right place: How the host country IPR influences the distribution of inventors in offshore R&D projects of multinational enterprises

Research summary: Prior work has shown that the strength of the intellectual property regime (IPR) in a host country influences offshore R&D to that country. Building on this work we propose that the strength of the IPR in a host country differentially influences the threat of knowledge leakage on projects that are produced for the location where the multinational firm is headquartered (home) versus the offshore location to which the R&D project is sent (host). We argue and show that when the host location has a weak IPR, fewer host inventors are involved in host R&D projects when compared to home R&D projects. We test our hypotheses using a dataset of patents held by US assignees, but coinvented in 43 host locations with differing IPR strength.Managerial summary: Multinational enterprises often cite the weak IPRs at emerging economy host destinations as a significant impediment to offshore R&D activities in those countries, despite the abundant supply of inexpensive scientific talent there. We find that the weak IPR at the host destination is a greater impediment to offshore R&D that is aimed for end use at the host market than for R&D that is aimed for end use globally or in the home market. Since IPRs are local, a weaker IPR at the host location does not protect IP that is relevant to the host market. Since the IPR at the home country is more relevant for technologies aimed at the home market, the IPR at the host country is irrelevant for such R&D projects. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Composition of inventor teams and technological progress – The role of collaboration between academia and industry

It is generally claimed that universities provide the scientific basis for future technological progress. Still, empirical evidence of the impact of direct links between universities and firms remains weak and is often inconsistent. This paper aims at contributing to the literature by analyzing how direct academic involvement affects the output of inventive activities of research teams with different organizational backgrounds. By applying a unique dataset of German academic and corporate patents, we find that boundary-spanning knowledge production with academic inventors raises the innovative performance of SMEs and MNEs. Finally, in line with previous research, the results generally indicate a limiting effect of geographical proximity, while teams with academic involvement appear to be less affected.

Thriving innovation amidst manufacturing decline: the Detroit auto cluster and the resilience of local knowledge production

Analyzing the comprehensive 35-year patent data set associated with the Detroit auto cluster we confirm that innovation in clusters can increase in spite of a long-term decline in manufacturing activity. The “stickiness” of local knowledge is sustained by: (i) increasing technological specialization at the local level and (ii) growing connectedness to global centers of excellence. The very forces that bring about the decline in manufacturing in a cluster sustain their position as a global center of innovative excellence.

Integrated Silicon Photonics: Visualisation of Patent Datasets for Mapping Technology

Analysing patent information is considered to be one of the most systematic and logical methodology to get an insight into the progress of technologies. Patent statistics can be used to ascertain the maturity of specific technologies or to identify technological trends. Similarly, it is possible to identify whether research activities are clustered or scattered by comparing the number of applications with the number of applicants. Visualization technique is considered to be most eloquent and illustrative way of representing patent information and its analysis results to get insight into various aspects of any particular technology 1 . Statistical analysis of the relevant patent dataset is carried out using patent maps in the visualisation techniques. Different patent maps help in understanding various aspects about the searched system/technology like top patent assignees, top Inventors. Time based analysis provides the trends of technology on the time scale, while cross-mapping of the patent documents provides further useful information. All the above analysis can be illustrated in patent maps to make it more presentable, structured and customised. In the present paper, the patent maps have been exploited to understand technologies and other aspects related to the integrated silicon photonics. DOI: 10.14429/djlit.35.2.8425