Policy entrepreneurship in the co-evolution of institutions, preferences, and technology: Comparing the diffusion of totally chlorine free pulp bleaching technologies in the US and Sweden

This paper uses the concept of policy entrepreneurship to explain the social processes underlying sustainable technical change in the pulp and paper industry in the 1990s. It presents a detailed case study on the differences in the transition to and diffusion of totally chlorine free (TCF) pulp bleaching methods in Sweden and the USA. This change was sustained in the former, while it was almost absent in the latter. The paper studies the causes for this difference. It looks at the complex coevolution of technology, institutions, and consumer preferences that has taken place in both countries and draws conclusions on how transitions to sustainable paths in production and consumption may be supported by economic and social policy.     

Technological pervasiveness and variety of innovators in Green ICT: A patent-based analysis

Many eco-innovations have been linked to technical change in the ICT domain. Leveraging the distinctive features of general purpose technologies, ICT have the potential to steer green growth and to help decouple this growth from ecological damage. The paper aims to shed light on innovation dynamics in this emerging sector by investigating the patterns of innovation in the green ICT domains using granted EPO patent data from 1986 to 2006. By means of a network analysis, it identifies existing green ICT domains and examines the characteristics of innovative activity in these domains, focusing in particular on growth and technological pervasiveness, as well as on the variety of innovators. Results indicate that the innovative activity in green ICT domains is characterised by high growth and high levels of technological pervasiveness, considerable entry of new innovators and a variety of actors – with a prevalence of large ICT firms and universities. However, the analysis highlights the existence of three different clusters – emerging fields, established fields and mature fields – that are defined by different structures of innovative activities and by different technological opportunities.     

我国人工智能产业技术创新路径识别及分析——基于专利分析法

基于专利分析方法和技术轨迹理论,以人工智能产业组织为研究对象,采用定性分析的方式,从人工智能核心技术、专利引用网络和专业商业化三个维度,对我国人工智能产业技术创新路径进行了识别和对比分析。通过对比我国与发达国家的人工智能产业技术创新路径,分析了我国人工智能产业目前的发展阶段和瓶颈。数据分析表明,我国人工智能产业尽管发展迅速,但相比发达国家,仍然处于知识引入到知识输出转型阶段。进而推出结论：我国人工智能产业处于基础型研究向应用型模式转变阶段,需要深入加强自主技术创新。     

The evolution of waste into a resource: Examining innovation in technologies reusing coal combustion by-products using patent data

The reuse of waste begins with the development of new technologies for ways to use waste. Despite the critical role of innovation in waste reuse, innovation for waste reuse technologies has been largely overlooked in innovation studies. This paper presents the first patent study examining the innovation process for a specific waste reuse technology, to elucidate how waste evolves into a resource with a greater possibility of being used. This study specifically analyzes how innovation occurs, what drives it, and the consequences of this innovation. Coal combustion by-products (CCBs), which are solid residues generated from coal-fired utilities, are specifically examined as a test case because they have been promoted as a resource through century-long innovative efforts for use in construction, mining, and agricultural applications. Having examined more than 700 patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office database, the results of this study show that innovation has primarily occurred: (1) to reuse CCBs, particularly fly ash, in various building, construction, and structural products; (2) by businesses, particularly those that need to use CCBs; and (3) since 1967, and the number of CCB-related patents peaked during the early 1980s and 1990s. For the drivers of innovation, this study identifies the impact of some market factors, such as cement and lime price, and institutional activities, such as the establishment of industrial associations that support CCB reuse, on patent filings. The role of regulation in innovation, however, is ambiguous with regard to CCB reuse. Although more CCBs have been used as more innovation occurs, the use of CCBs has increased with a lag, due to variation in the values of individual technologies and barriers to the implementation of technologies in the reuse market.     

A novel technology-industry concordance table based on linked inventor-establishment data

Mapping technologies into industries is frequently required in empirical innovation studies, but many concordances only provide coarse mappings. We develop a novel concordance between industries and technologies making use of linked inventor-employee data for a large sample of German patents filed at the European Patent Office between 1999 and 2011. Inventors listed on these patents are matched and disambiguated with German social security records. Employment data recorded in this database include detailed industry codes describing the industrial activities of the inventors’ establishments. These linked microdata allow us to identify the precise industrial origin of inventions, combine them with technology classifications from the inventors’ patents and to generate novel concordance tables. We evaluate our approach by comparing the concordances with existing work. Moreover, in an empirical application, we find that patent based indicators represent valid proxies for the innovation performance of industries and thus help to measure innovation in the absence of other survey based indicators. Service sector innovation activities, however, appear to be barely represented by the patenting activities of inventors and establishments.     

Electricity sector liberalisation and innovation: An analysis of the UK's patenting activities

Liberalisation has had a marked effect on innovative activities in the electricity industry. In particular, electricity reforms have resulted in a reduction in R&D spending in the sector. R&D and patenting activities are respectively regarded as innovative inputs to and outputs from technological progress. The present paper examines the effect of the reforms on patenting activity in the UK electricity sector. The results indicate that electricity related patents in non-nuclear and renewable technologies have increased in the post-liberalisation period. We attribute this trend to the increased commercialisation of the sector. While this development is positive, we argue that a lasting decline in R&D will in the longer run reduce technological progress and innovation in the sector. In order to maintain the pace of innovation, we discuss the need to design a new framework for innovation systems that is commensurate with the functioning and incentive mechanisms of a liberalised sector.     

专利视角下的供应链创新网络演化研究

   专利创新作为助推行业转型升级和价值再造的战略工具之一,其布局及演化历来备受各国关注。随着全球产业链、价值链及供应链格局演变,供应链专利数量呈指数级增长,成为供应链创新的风向标和指示器。本文选取中国、美国、日本、德国、韩国供应链专利数据作为研究对象,深度挖掘1990—2016年共27年供应链专利数据池,从合作创新、空间结构、技术主题三方面,采用定量和可视化方法分析网络特征及演化路径。研究发现:（1）供应链专利创新网络演变过程与全球产业发展轨迹高度一致,计算/推算/计数、通信技术、输送/包装/贮存等为供应链专利申请热点,也是各国专利技术必争之地。（2）供应链合作创新网络不断趋于成熟,异质性社区结构逐渐凸显,各国亟须消除锁定效应,增强产学研协同创新规模。（3）供应链专利空间网络规模逐渐扩大,但空间布局不均衡,各国多以本国跨区合作为主,跨国合作为副,跨国合作多以美日韩三国间合作居多。（4）中国供应链创新专利规模增大,但产学研协同创新模式尚未真正发挥作用,技术主题布局与我国优势产业发展尚不匹配,亟须顶层设计供应链专利布局。     

Comparing firms’ triadic patent applications across countries: Is there a gap in terms of R&D effort or a gap in terms of performances?

This paper addresses the question of national differences as regard the number of triadic patents applied for by inventors from several OECD countries. The key idea is to determine whether such differences should be attributed to differences in R&D expenditures or rather to some other reasons, mainly institutional or behavioural ones. With this aim in view, both a macro-economic analysis, based on aggregate data for triadic patent counts and R&D expenditures and a micro-economic analysis based on firms’ data from three selected sectors are performed. In both cases, the methodological focus is made on the introduction, the definition and the estimation of a national index of relative efficiency in standard count data models. The main empirical findings are that there is a strong heterogeneity in terms of performance among European countries and a strong intra-country heterogeneity among sectors. This suggests that, in the field of innovation policies, there is a need for “tailored” solutions reflecting the specificities of each innovation system. Moreover, we show that European countries over-perform the United States in some high-tech sectors where the leadership of American firms is traditionally alleged, whereas European firms fail to keep up in more traditional sectors.     

An Empirical Study of Nanowire Technological Trends

This paper follows a bibliometric method for nanowire case to make evident the technological trends; to present the relationship between patents; to help the researchers to discover relatively significant patents and to analyse important relationships between patents to identify those with most commercial potential and those which are critical technologies. This research focuses on the nanowire case study due to fact that this field is one of the most mature nanostructures and is one of the highly invested fields in nanotechnology. In terms of methodological approach, this study uses a different patent collection method than previous studies. This new method offers a new taxonomy that could make a significant impact on accurate patent data quests and increase the reliability of the patent analyses. As patent data are valuable sources of technology innovation and for forecasting technical change, this study utilises nanowire patent documents to pick out the technological trends, to identify nanowire technologies which both have the most commercial potential and which are critical at the organisational, national and international levels.     

Transition towards a green economy in Europe: Innovation and knowledge integration in the renewable energy sector

This paper investigates the fragmentation of the EU innovation system in the field of renewable energy sources (RES) by estimating the intensity and direction of knowledge spillovers over the years 1985–2010. We modify the original double exponential knowledge diffusion model proposed by Caballero and Jaffe (1993) to provide information on the degree of integration of EU countries’ RES knowledge bases and to assess how citation patterns changed over time. We show that EU RES inventors have increasingly built “on the shoulders of the other EU giants”, intensifying their citations to other member countries and decreasing those to domestic inventors. Furthermore, the EU strengthened its position as source of RES knowledge for the US. Finally, we show that this pattern is peculiar to RES, with other traditional (i.e. fossil-based) energy technologies and other radically new technologies behaving differently. Our results provide suggestive, but convincing evidence that the reduction in fragmentation emerged as a result of the EU support for RES taking mainly the form of demand-pull policies.     

Using patent citation patterns to infer innovation market competition

We propose an empirical strategy to estimate competition in innovation markets. Our method relates firms’ market return on equity to information about patent citation patterns. Two innovations are implemented in the methodology. First is the application of daily abnormal stock returns rather than annual measures of Tobin's q. Second is the creation of citation patterns related to the area of science a firm patents in as represented by the detailed patent classification system. We find that markets positively reward firms when patents are granted. We further find that firm's market value increases when its patent portfolio is cited. We find evidence of competition in innovation markets. The market reacts at the time that the citation occurs and does not anticipate future citations at the time of patenting. Holding this effect constant, we find that citations from patents in the same area of science tend to reduce market value. We interpret these findings as consistent with more citations indicating more valuable intellectual property but citations from competing technologies decreasing it.     

The impact of patent protection and financial development on industrial R&D

Stronger protection of patent rights is thought to spur innovation through securing returns to R&D investments. Those investments must be financed, however, suggesting that the responsiveness of R&D to patent reforms varies with financial development levels. We examine the joint impact of domestic and international financial-market development and patent protection on R&D intensities in 22 manufacturing industries in 20 OECD countries for the period 1990-2009. We show that stronger patent rights increase R&D intensities in patent-intensive industries, accounting for the need for external financing and the amount of tangible assets. The primary impact varies across types of financial development: patent protection raises R&D in high-patent industries where countries have more limited equity and credit markets. In contrast, in countries with more developed bond markets industry R&D is more sensitive to patent rights. Interestingly, patent rights in countries that are more exposed to foreign direct investment increase R&D intensities at all levels of financial development.     

Nonlinear capital market payoffs to science-led innovation

This study explores the extent to which cross-sectional differences in firms’ propensity to absorb and utilize scientific knowledge matter for their stock market and operating performance. Unlike previous empirical studies and given the coexistence of both benefits and potential costs to science-guided search, I conceptualize innovation as a recombinant search to hypothesize a non-monotonic relationship. Using patent data from the European Patent Office (EPO) relative to 3281 international firms over the 1999–2015 period, empirical tests yield evidence in support of the predictions. However, the effect varies with firm-level absorptive capacity, across industries and countries. As suggested by a limited attention model, I find a stronger payoff predictive power of science for firms with lower investor attention and higher valuation uncertainty. Besides, the association between science and future operating performance increases with time, indicating that firms’ scientific capabilities are a potent driver of long-term profitability. The conclusions are robust to controlling for the endogenous nature of firms’ use of scientific knowledge. By providing a useful basis upon which to judge the economic merit of firms’ innovation endeavors, this study contributes to reducing capital market imperfections that curtail access to external finance and ultimately spurring private-sector investment in R&D. It also provides evidence of diminishing marginal payoffs to science-led search. Finally, the evidence is likely to be relevant to policymakers, who might wish to influence the innovation ecosystem in a way to sustain long-term prosperity.     

Trademarks’ relatedness to product and service innovation: A branding strategy approach

The use of trademark data in innovation studies is still limited because as yet no guidelines exist to ascertain which trademarks relate to innovation. This paper proposes that a branding strategy approach may help to identify innovation related trademarks. Companies use distinctive branding strategies for innovation and these branding strategies have important consequences for the design of new trademarks and their application scope. Based on a sample of Benelux and Community trademarks, we find that trademarks for brand creation relate more often to product innovation. In addition, we find negative effects of a trademark’s industry scope on its relatedness to product innovation, and of a trademark’s geographic scope on its relatedness to service innovation. Our findings bear several key implications for further research towards identifying innovation-related trademarks from a branding strategy perspective.     

基于专利文献计量的中外中高档数控机床技术差距分析

目前在识别中外中高档数控机床技术差距的研究中,存在技术缺口信息不够丰富、缺乏基于数据层面对技术缺口内容进行客观描述等问题。基于文献计量与专利分析及信息可视化工具,使用多源数据分析全球数控机床领域研究进展与趋势,通过国内外典型企业的产品数据与专利信息匹配来识别中国中高档数控机床技术缺口与短板,为相关决策提供数据和方法支持。研究结果表明:中国在中高档数控机床的主机产品、可靠性技术、数字化设计技术等方面仍存在不同层次的创新缺口。基于分析结果,对中国中高档数控机床的创新发展,分别从国家、企业和科研机构层面提出加强基础共性技术研发、构筑起能与工业发达国家竞争的技术创新体系和技术创新人才队伍,突破关键主机及成套装备创新、加强工艺研究和引进消化吸收力度以及相应的创新平台建设,加强情报智力支持作用、注重人才培养并积极为政府和企业提供动态性咨询服务等对策建议。     

互联网发展与技术创新：专利生产、更新与引用视角

本文在理论上分析互联网发展对技术创新的可能影响机制,利用2007—2014年我国230个地级市的面板数据,通过主成分分析法构建了互联网发展指数。并进一步应用工具变量法实证研究了互联网发展对技术创新产生的影响及其内在传导机制。本文采用1984年各城市每百人固定电话数量与电信投资量的交互项作为研究的工具变量。实证表明：（1）无论从专利数据还是城市创新指数来看,互联网发展都显著促进了技术创新;（2）互联网发展加速了专利的折旧速度,有利于提高创新知识的更新速度;（3）互联网发展加快信息的传播,提升了专利的国内外引用,显著增加了创新知识的溢出。本文为我国“互联网＋”行动计划、创新型国家建设奠定了理论与事实基础。     

经济租金视角下的专利商业化价值分析

专利在提高企业自身竞争优势、防御潜在入侵者、强化企业资源转化以及企业未来创新等运营活动中起着不可忽视的作用,因为企业通过专利可以进行“创造性破坏”的商业活动,打破原壁垒,形成新的标准商业模式。基于经济租金理论,在前人研究成果之上对专利价值的商业化表现进行分析,经研究得出专利商业化能够优化价值创造系统本身,良性的价值创造系统能够为企业带来持续不断的递增效益,在专利技术创新类型为“创造性破坏”创新时,专利商业化价值是其产生的战略性资源效益。     

Inventing by combining pre-existing technologies: Patent evidence on learning and fishing out

I develop a model of innovation where new technologies are combinations of pre-existing technological components. The model captures two opposing forces. The best ideas are used up (knowledge is exhaustible). However, as firms learn which technologies can be combined, new ideas become feasible (knowledge accumulates). I test the model with more than 80 years of US patent data. Technological components are proxied by 13,517 patent office technology classifications. These are reused and recycled in 10,000 distinct three-component sets. Consistent with a learning/fishing-out dynamic, I show patenting in one set of components is correlated with a subsequent increase in similar patents (sharing two of three components), but a subsequent decrease in identical patents (sharing all three components). I use patent renewal data to show my results are not driven by changes in demand for various technology bundles. My results suggest the positive impact of learning on subsequent patenting is larger than the negative impact of fishing out.     

专利对外许可行为有助于企业自身创新能力发展吗?

本文使用2008—2017年中国制造业上市企业专利许可数据,采用倾向值得分匹配倍差法考察了企业专利技术对外许可行为与自身创新能力发展的关系。研究发现：总体而言,中国制造业上市企业专利技术对外许可行为存在显著的自选择效应,创新能力越强的企业选择对外许可其专利使用权的可能性越大;控制自选择效应后,企业专利对外许可行为对自身创新能力的发展有长期促进作用。对不同技术类型企业研究发现,高、低技术产业企业的专利许可行为对其自身创新能力提升分别有长、短期促进作用,中技术产业企业的许可行为对企业创新能力发展则无显著影响。     

Resolving the patents paradox in the era of COVID-19 and climate change: Towards a patents taxonomy

This paper revisits the patents debate and considers the role of intellectual property rights and their impact on society in the context of inventions designed to protect global common pool resources (CPRs) such as public health and the environment. A review of the theoretical and empirical literature suggests that there has never been a clear consensus among researchers on the benefits of the patent system and intellectual property rights. As Robinson notes, “The patent system introduces some of the greatest of the complexities in the capitalist rules of the game and leads to many anomalies.” We explore these anomalies by specifying a taxonomy of patents for different classes of inventions, including inventions to protect CPRs. This includes vaccines and inventions that reduce externalities, such as, CFC gases and greenhouse gas emissions. In these instances, the effectiveness of innovations depends critically on rapid global diffusion. Our theoretical analysis utilises Ostrom's CPR dilemma to analyse the complexities surrounding innovation and CPRs.We find that the effectiveness of innovations to protect CPRs depends on industrial characteristics and the wider regulatory environment. Empirical evidence is brought to bear on these conclusions via 2 case studies that each embodies a natural experiment; one on vaccines pre- and post-TRIPS and one on environmental technologies to reduce CFC gases and CO₂ emissions with and without an agreed UN Protocol. The insights gained are explored in our policy section. Our analysis suggests the need for a more nuanced approach to patent policy that is embedded in the wider context of innovation systems and takes account of the anomalies raised by CPRs. For CPR protecting innovations subject to positive network externalities, we advocate that policy should prioritise diffusion over private incentives for R&D and use alternative policies to patents to stimulate investment in R&D.