Abstract
Inventors and organizational assets are inputs of inventive activities which are often provided at a global scale, where countries might specialize in the provision of one or the other type of inputs. We introduce a new patent-based metric, the 'inventor balance', to quantify this type of functional specialization, which we discover to be considerable, and we propose a conceptual framework to explain it. We observe a progressive 'decoupling' of national sub-systems providing respectively inventors and organizational assets. Moreover, we find that countries with a high level of innovativeness relative to their economic development, high technological specialization, and strong individualistic cultural traits, contribute relatively more inventors than organizations to the global production of inventions.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 39-61 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Economics of Innovation and New Technology |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 14 Mar 2017 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jan 2018 |
Keywords
- Patents
- Inventor balance
- Inventor criterion
- Applicant criterion
- Internationalization of R&D
- Specialization
- Technology gaps
Access to Document
- Inventor_Balance_2017_01_31_accepted_manuscript
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10438599.2017.1293598