Abstract
Technology transfer has become a vital pipeline for acquiring external knowledge. In this study, we propose new evidence on Chinese knowledge flows at a provincial scale based on patent licensing data at the China National Intellectual Property Administration, involving 31 Chinese provinces and all foreign entities. For temporal features, licensing frequencies, the type of patent licensors, the distribution and transfer speed by technical fields were first present. Then, topological structures and centrality rankings, spatial evolution and reciprocity, and blockmodeling were performed in sequence for network analysis. The major findings are: (1) foreign technology played an important role in China and is still an important knowledge source; (2) individuals and enterprises dominate the technology output, and the role of universities and research institutes as innovation engines has not been fully realized; (3) the technical fields of performing, operations, and transporting have extremely active market performance and are favored by market players; (4) patent licensing networks present clear small-world phenomenon, and there is a conspicuous regional hierarchical structure for patent-expanding capabilities in various provinces; (5) an integrally compact, locally dispersed, and multi-core structure centered on Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Beijing is being formed in the networks; (6) three blocks that play different roles in the patent licensing network are distinguished: source, absorber and beginner. This paper provides important implications for considering the impacts of technology transfer policies implemented so far, and can be useful for making evidence-based policies to establish a more effective national technology transfer system.
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Notes
Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau have their own independent intellectual property systems and are therefore handled part of the foreign region for following analysis, which does not mean that the authors agree with their independence in national sovereignty. Besides the three regions, there are 31 provincial administrative regions in China, including 22 provinces, 4 municipalities and 5 autonomous regions.
There are three types of patent in China: invention patent, utility model patent, and design patent. According to the definition of Article 2 of China’s Patent Law (http://www.gov.cn/flfg/2008-12/28/content_1189755.htm), the design patent is essentially a new design rather than a technical solution. Hence, the results presented below are based on patent licenses of invention patents and utility model patents.
IncoPat is a famous commercial platform for patent information search in China, which contains more than 100 million patents of 102 countries, organizations, and regions. Through comprehensive data integration processing, more than 230 fields can be retrieved, including patent legal status, citation, and licensing information.
The adjacency matrix represents the edges, and the value of the matrix element in row i, column j, is one if there is an edge between those nodes, and zero if not. For directed networks, the adjacency matrix is unsymmetric.
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The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments in reviewing this paper. The research work was supported by National Social Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 15BTQ047.
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Yang, W., Yu, X., Wang, D. et al. Spatio-temporal evolution of technology flows in China: patent licensing networks 2000–2017. J Technol Transf 46, 1674–1703 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-019-09739-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-019-09739-8