Technological Innovation Performance Analysis Using Multilayer Networks: Evidence from the Printer Industry

Department of Management EngineeringThe importance of collaboration and technology boundary spanning has been emphasized in other inquiries into technological innovation. Therefore, this research project first tried to investigate the effect of collaboration on technology boundary spanning. Then, we investigated the effect of collaboration and technology boundary spanning on technological innovation within a firm by using a multilayer network to analyze patent data. The aim of this paper is to provide new insight into the process of analyzing patent data using multilayer networks. This empirical study is based on a sample of 408 firms within the printer industry from 1996 to 2005. Starting with a theoretical discussion of R&D collaboration, technology boundary spanning and innovation performance, the importance of a firm???s collaboration and technology boundary spanning in its technology innovation performance was empirically analyzed using patent data. We followed changes in collaboration networks, technology class networks and the connection between them and tried to find the meaning of those changes in firms??? technology innovation performances. We used degree centrality within the collaboration network and the ratio of collaborated patents to the total number of patents in order to measure a firm???s collaboration and formulated technology boundary spanning represented by exploitation and exploration by using edges of the multilayer network. As dependent variables, we used the number of patents and the average number of citations received over three, five, and 10 years to measure the firm???s quantitative and qualitative innovation performance respectively. The results of the analysis can be summarized as follows: a firm???s collaboration has positive effects on both exploitation and exploration. Firms with more collaborations show higher quantitative innovation performances while firms with more collaborations exhibit lower qualitative innovation performance. Exploitation has a positive impact on a firm???s quantitative innovation performance while exploration has negative effects on a firm???s quantitative innovation performance. The relationship between a firm???s exploration activities and a firm???s qualitative innovation performance manifests as an inverted U-shape. On the other hand, a firm???s exploitation activities have a U-shape relationship with the firm???s qualitative innovation performance. The implication of this study is that multilayer networks can be used to analyze patent data. This study used multilayer networks to formulate the exploitation and exploration only. However, in further research it can be utilized to find the hub firms that fuse technologies.clos

The evolution of networks of innovators within and across borders: Evidence from patent data

Recent studies on the geography of knowledge networks have documented a negative impact of physical distance and institutional borders upon research and development (R&D) collaborations. Though it is widely recognized that geographic constraints and national borders impede the diffusion of knowledge, less attention has been devoted to the temporal evolution of these constraints. In this study we use data on patents filed with the European Patent Office (EPO) for OECD countries to analyze the impact of physical distance and country borders on inter-regional links in four different networks over the period 1988-2009: (1) co-inventorship, (2) patent citations, (3) inventor mobility and (4) the location of R&D laboratories. We find the constraint imposed by country borders and distance decreased until mid-1990s then started to grow, particularly for distance. We further investigate the role of large innovation "hubs" as attractors of new collaboration opportunities and the impact of region size and locality on the evolution of cross-border patenting activities. The intensity of European cross-country inventor collaborations increased at a higher pace than their non-European counterparts until 2004, with no significant relative progress thereafter. Moreover, when analyzing networks of geographical mobility, multinational R&D activities and patent citations we cannot detect any substantial progress in European research integration above and beyond the common global trend

World citation and collaboration networks: uncovering the role of geography in science

Modern information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, have diminished the role of spatial distances and territorial boundaries on the access and transmissibility of information. This has enabled scientists for closer collaboration and internationalization. Nevertheless, geography remains an important factor affecting the dynamics of science. Here we present a systematic analysis of citation and collaboration networks between cities and countries, by assigning papers to the geographic locations of their authors' affiliations. The citation flows as well as the collaboration strengths between cities decrease with the distance between them and follow gravity laws. In addition, the total research impact of a country grows linearly with the amount of national funding for research & development. However, the average impact reveals a peculiar threshold effect: the scientific output of a country may reach an impact larger than the world average only if the country invests more than about 100,000 USD per researcher annually.Comment: Published version. 9 pages, 5 figures + Appendix, The world citation and collaboration networks at both city and country level are available at http://becs.aalto.fi/~rajkp/datasets.htm

Gender Disparities in Science? Dropout, Productivity, Collaborations and Success of Male and Female Computer Scientists

Scientific collaborations shape ideas as well as innovations and are both the substrate for, and the outcome of, academic careers. Recent studies show that gender inequality is still present in many scientific practices ranging from hiring to peer-review processes and grant applications. In this work, we investigate gender-specific differences in collaboration patterns of more than one million computer scientists over the course of 47 years. We explore how these patterns change over years and career ages and how they impact scientific success. Our results highlight that successful male and female scientists reveal the same collaboration patterns: compared to scientists in the same career age, they tend to collaborate with more colleagues than other scientists, seek innovations as brokers and establish longer-lasting and more repetitive collaborations. However, women are on average less likely to adapt the collaboration patterns that are related with success, more likely to embed into ego networks devoid of structural holes, and they exhibit stronger gender homophily as well as a consistently higher dropout rate than men in all career ages

Constructing bibliometric networks: A comparison between full and fractional counting

The analysis of bibliometric networks, such as co-authorship, bibliographic coupling, and co-citation networks, has received a considerable amount of attention. Much less attention has been paid to the construction of these networks. We point out that different approaches can be taken to construct a bibliometric network. Normally the full counting approach is used, but we propose an alternative fractional counting approach. The basic idea of the fractional counting approach is that each action, such as co-authoring or citing a publication, should have equal weight, regardless of for instance the number of authors, citations, or references of a publication. We present two empirical analyses in which the full and fractional counting approaches yield very different results. These analyses deal with co-authorship networks of universities and bibliographic coupling networks of journals. Based on theoretical considerations and on the empirical analyses, we conclude that for many purposes the fractional counting approach is preferable over the full counting one