Importance of Regional Innovation Systems (Japanese)

When a new technology is invented to solve a certain problem, communication occurs between inventors taking part in the process. With the advancement of information and communication technology, communication of explicit knowledge between individuals in distant places has become far easier than ever before. But what about in cases where highly intensive and wide-ranging communication is required and tacit knowledge needs to be exchanged? For instance, during invention activities, what is the distance across which inventors communicate and exchange tacit knowledge? This study uses inventors of patented biotechnology inventions as samples, measuring the distances between the home addresses of co-inventors. The distance across which explicit knowledge is communicated is measured in terms of the distance between an inventor's address and the address of a research institution to which a research paper cited in the relevant patent is attributed. The two distances are then compared. It has been found that the median inter-inventor distance is some 32 km, far shorter than the median communication distance of 4,300 km. This suggests that, even in this age of globalization, the presence of knowledge agglomeration within or nearby a specific country or region remains important to the enhancement of the industrial competitiveness of that country or region. The findings will serve as a useful reference for policy-makers in the formulation of science and technology policies as well as regional policies.

Spatial Characteristics of Joint Application Networks in Japanese Patents

Technological innovation has extensively been studied to make firms sustainable and more competitive. Within this context, the most important recent issue has been the dynamics of collaborative innovation among firms. We therefore investigated a patent network, especially focusing on its spatial characteristics. The results can be summarized as follows. (1) The degree distribution in a patent network follows a power law. A firm can then be connected to many firms via hubs connected to the firm. (2) The neighbors' average degree has a null correlation, but the clustering coefficient has a negative correlation. The latter means that there is a hierarchical structure and bridging different modules may shorten the paths between the nodes in them. (3) The distance of links not only indicates the regional accumulations of firms, but the importance of time it takes to travel, which plays a key role in creating links. (4) The ratio of internal links in cities indicates that we have to consider the existing links firms have to facilitate the creation of new links

An Analysis of Transaction and Joint-Patent Application Networks (Japanese)

Many firms these days, forced by increasing international competition and an unstable economy, are opting to specialize rather than generalize as a way of maintaining their competitiveness. Consequently, firms cannot rely solely on themselves, but must cooperate by combining their advantages. To obtain the actual conditions for this cooperation, a multi-layered network based on two different types of data was investigated. The first type was transaction data from Japanese firms. The network created from the data included 961,363 firms and 7,808,760 links. The second type of data was from joint-patent applications in Japan. The joint-patent application network included 54,197 nodes and 154,205 links. These two networks were merged into one network. We analyzed the data from the viewpoint of input-output tables, the ERG model, and Bayesian networks.

Analysis of Joint Patent Applications by Universities or Public Research Institutes and Private-Sector Firms (Japanese)

The technologies used in any one product have become increasingly diverse and sophisticated, and as a result it is becoming difficult for firms to provide, in-house, the technologies and scientific knowledge required for innovation. On the other hand, collaboration between multiple organizations incurs costs for coordination. In this paper we conduct an analysis of joint applications (industry-university collaborative patents) by domestic private-sector firms and universities or public research institutes, in order to gain insights into the circumstances under these collaborations, even if the firms have to pay coordination costs. We obtain the following results. (1) An analysis of developments over past years shows that the overall number of patent applications is increasing and the number of industry-university collaborative patents is also trending upward. The proportion of the latter accounted for by patent applications filed through collaboration between multiple organizations has been on an uptrend since 1998. (2) Applications for industry-university collaborative patents are concentrated on certain fields, including those related to genetic engineering, chemistry, electronic engineering (semiconductor processing), and civil engineering. The reason for this characteristic appears to be that on the academic side there is particular strength in these fields. In fact, the distribution of the fields of these collaborative patents has tended to be closer to the distribution of the fields of academic patent applications than that of the fields of patent applications by industrial firms. (3) The more companies have been filing patent applications in numerous technical fields, the more they have been filing industry-university collaborative patents. In other words, the more companies engage in research and development in a broad range of fields, the more they need the assistance of universities and public research institutes. On the other hand, as the fields of R&D engaged in by industry grow broader, the proportion of individual companies' industry-university collaborative patents to total patents has declined. What this appears to show is that, as stated above, the number of fields of strength on the side of academia is limited, and costs are incurred by the transmission of tacit knowledge that transcends individual organizations, so industry-university collaboration is conducted in a strategic manner in a limited number of fields.

Which Industries Are Most Science-Based? (Japanese)

Many industrial innovations would not have occurred without substantial delay if there had not been academic research behind them, and the linkage between industrial innovation and academic research is now gaining much more attention because of the increasing complexity of technologies. The authors have shown that a particularly high degree of science linkage is observed in the area of biotechnology, based on an analysis of the number of citations of scientific papers in patents (science linkage) by type of technology (RIETI DP 04-E-034). Building on this previous analysis, the present research project aims to provide quantitative evidence showing the degree to which Japanese technology development is dependent on science by type of industry. The data on the degree of science dependence is extremely important from the viewpoint of formulating science and technology policies, such as support for scientific research, as well as in implementing industrial policies such as those designed to promote new businesses. Conventional discussions of science dependence, however, have mostly been based on the ratio of research and development (R&D) expenditures to total sales. In contrast, our analysis of science linkage directly examines how technology development in each industry is influenced by science. This enables us to get a clear picture of science-based industries. The analysis shows a high degree of science linkage in the pharmaceutical, food, and chemical industries, with the remaining industries showing a relatively low linkage. This result indicates that the characteristics of technology development differ substantially depending on the type of industry, and therefore that such differences need to be taken into account in formulating industrial policies.

Science linkages in technologies patented in Japan

We constructed an original database concerning science linkages based on text of Japanese Patent Gazette published since 1994. We discovered that Japanese inventers cite many academic papers in the texts of the patent applications in the Japanese Patent System. Based on this finding, we constructed science citation index by data mining the texts of Japanese patent system for the first time. First, more than 880,000 patent data classified into about 600 categories. Then, we extracted non-patent references from all the granted patents and counted the number of them. This number shows the strength of the linkage between science and technology and therefore is called "science linkage index." The science linkage indexes among different patent classifications differ significantly from each other. The technologies related to bio -technology were by far the closest to science. It suggests that the process of creating new technology differs from technology to technology.

Indicators for Identifying Important Patents (Japanese)

Research on innovation provides fundamental insights for productive discourse on science and technology policy. However, there has been little analysis conducted in Japan on the innovation indicators using patent statistics. The indicators typically used to date such as research and development investment amount and the simple count of number of patents. Apparently, there is a need for more sophisticated indicators. This paper focuses on the importance of patents as a first step to construct more informative innovation indicator. We used Technology Trend Surveys published by the Japan Patent Office which select important patents using expert opinion, then considered possible indicators to identify important patents. The findings show that the number of citations received is effective as an indicator of the importance of patents, and that the number of inventors and the number of patents cited are also effective indicators. In the life sciences, however, the findings demonstrate that while the number of research papers cited (science linkage) in important patents tends to be high, a high science linkage does not necessarily serve as an indicator for identifying important patents.