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Inventor collaboration over distance: a comparison of academic and corporate patents

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Abstract

Patenting is often done in collaboration with other inventors to integrate complementary and additional knowledge. The paper takes a spatial view of this issue and analyses the distances between inventors of German patents. We compare the distances between invention teams of German patent applications from 1993–2006 and distinguish between academic and corporate teams and those consisting of researchers from both domains (‘mixed teams’). Due to their different institutional backgrounds different types of proximity guide their spatial search for partners. The basic finding is that regional collaboration clearly prevails. However, the distance between collaborating inventors of corporate patents exceeds that of inventors of academic patents, but the largest distances can be found in science–industry collaborative patents. When excluding directly neighboured collaboration, which is likely to be in-house collaboration, the differences between academic and corporate teams vanish, but mixed teams still overcome longer distances.

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Notes

  1. We used a route planner to calculate the distances in order to take account of the real reachability. This approach is similar to the one used by Frenken et al. (2009). For distances exceeding the scope of the route planner (i.e. extra-Europe) an airline distance was estimated.

  2. The thresholds of DistO-1 are selected by the following considerations: Less than 20 km working/living in the same city, below 50 km is still commuting distance, the next two categories reflect traveling by short-distance and long-distance train respectively, and the last two distance categories are traveled by short distance and medium-to-long distance flights respectively.

  3. As mentioned in “Data” we had to include teams whose partners work for the same affiliation. We assume these collaborations to be those cases where inventors live <20 km apart (working in the same department or at least the same location of an organization). The short distance term of 20 km is a common commuter distance. According to the Statistical Office of Germany (STATmagazin 2009), in 2008 only 16.2 % of jobholders commuted more than 25 km.

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  1. Department of Geography, Philipps-University Marburg, Deutschhausstrasse 10, 35032, Marburg, Germany

    Sidonia von Proff & Anja Dettmann

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  1. Sidonia von Proff
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  2. Anja Dettmann
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Correspondence to Sidonia von Proff.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5, 6, 7.

Table 5 Employed industries referring to the concordance of patent classes and industries of Ulrich Schmoch
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Table 6 Regression results with detailed industry classification
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Table 7 Regression results for all patents excluding those where the first distance measure falls below 20 km
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von Proff, S., Dettmann, A. Inventor collaboration over distance: a comparison of academic and corporate patents. Scientometrics 94, 1217–1238 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0812-8

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