Technologies and Inter-industrial Collaborations: A Patent Analysis

This chapter seeks to map global inter-industry technology collaborations over the recent period. It considers research and development (R&D) collaborations using data on patent co-filings. A co-filed patent is the result of a collaborative action where the actors share the property rights of an invention. A co-filed patent claiming a unique technology can be represented as a “graph”. When a co-filer claims multiple technologies, the graph becomes a “multigraph” where each link between companies or sectors specifies the claimed technology. Links between companies and sectors can be aggregated so that the multigraph becomes a simple graph. The chapter uses patent databases to build graphs of the relationships between sectoral innovation system and technological innovation system. It measures inter-industry collaboration in R&D under the entries “sectors” and “institutional environments”.