Abstract
Only a few cases of systematic empirical research have been reported investigating collaborative knowledge production in China and its implications for China’s national and regional innovation system. Using Chinese patent data in the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), this paper examines the geographic variations in intraregional, inter-regional and international knowledge exchanges of China from 1985 to 2007. Degree centrality reveals that intraregional and international collaborations are the main channels of knowledge exchange for the provinces and municipalities of China while inter-regional knowledge exchange is relatively weak. Besides, over the two decades, the knowledge exchange network has been expanding (connecting an increasing number of provinces and countries), becoming more decentralized (increasing number of hubs) and more cohesive (more linkages). A blockmodel analysis further reveals that the inter-regional network of China begins to show characteristics of a core-periphery structure. The most active knowledge exchange occurs between members of the core block composed by the most advanced provinces while the members of the peripheral block from less favored regions have few or no local and extra-local knowledge exchange. Building a strong knowledge transfer network would much improve the innovation capacities in less favored regions and help them break out from their “locked-in” development trajectories.
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Notes
There are two reasons for using the patent data from the USPTO and not those from the State Intellectual Property Office of P.R. China (SIPO). On the one hand, the data form of the DVD-ROM from USPTO is more accessible and easily transferred into an analyzable form than the original data form (.txt) of SIPO. On the other hand, due to abundant information of international collaboration, the patent data from USPTO are more suitable to analyze the international knowledge exchange of China than those of SIPO.
This file gathers all actual inventors’ names listed on a patent and all their private addresses and not the firms’ addresses. In this paper, we use co-inventors’ addresses to analyse voluntary collaborations and knowledge exchanges between regions.
The Chinese patents from the USPTO used in this paper include only a small portion of all Chinese patents because most of Chinese patents are granted by the SIPO. As a result, this paper just provides part of the picture of knowledge exchanges in the provinces and municipalities of China.
Records in which addresses of co-inventors are incomplete or not available were deleted from our database.
The international co-inventors among these collaboration cases were also included in order to explore the international knowledge exchange of China.
A loop is a special kind of line, namely, a line that connects a vertex to itself (De Nooy et al. 2005).
For two provinces, namely Xizang (Tibet) and Qinghai, no patents have been granted by the USPTO in the studied periods. Hence we just focus on the other provinces and municipalities of China. Besides Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao, there were 30 provinces in China before 1997. Chongqing became the fourth municipality in 1997. Here, to make the analyses consistent, Chongqing is always treated as a city in Sichuan in the first and second periods, i.e., 1985–1992 and 1993–2000, and as the fourth municipality of China in the third period of 2001–2007. The collaborations between the provinces of mainland China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao are always considered as international knowledge exchanges.
China is a large country with a vast territory of 9.6 million km2, stretching from the temperate to subtropical zones. Geographically, it can be roughly divided into less favoured regions and favoured regions. Generally speaking, less favoured regions include the interior provinces in the central and western regions, such as Sichuan, Neimenggu, Guizhou, Ningxia and Shanxi, etc. Most of them are mountainous and poor. Favoured regions include most advanced municipalities and coastal provinces, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shandong, and Guangdong. These provinces have more favourable natural conditions and are rich.
A k-core is a maximal subnetwork in which each vertex has at least degree k within the subnetwork (De Nooy et al. 2005). This notion helps to find cohesive subgroups.
Vertices that attract many links are called “hubs.”
A blockmodel is a simplified representation of a multi-relational network to show the relations among individuals with structural equivalence (Wasserman and Faust 1994).
Two vertices are structural equivalent if they have identical ties with themselves, each other, and all other vertices (De Nooy et al. 2005).
In a matrix, each row and column represent one vertex of the network. The intersection of a row and a column is called a cell of the matrix.
Density is the ratio of present lines to the maximum possible number of lines, excluding diagonal cells.
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Acknowledgments
This research is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project no. 70773006), the National Social Science Foundation of China (Project no. 10zd&014) and the Program of Higher-level talents of Inner Mongolia University of China (Project No. Z20090115). The authors are very grateful for the valuable comments and suggestions of the anonymous reviewers and Editor-in-Chief Prof. Braun, which significantly improved the article.
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Gao, X., Guan, J. & Rousseau, R. Mapping collaborative knowledge production in China using patent co-inventorships. Scientometrics 88, 343–362 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0404-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0404-z