Francesco Lissoni

Knowledge-relatedness in firm technological diversification

Abstract This paper claims that knowledge-relatedness is a key factor in affecting firms’ technological diversification. The hypothesis is tested that firms extend the range of their innovative activities in a non-random way. Specifically, we test the extent to which firms diversify their innovative activities across related technological fields, i.e. fields that share a common knowledge base and rely upon common heuristics and scientific principles. The paper proposes an original measure of knowledge-relatedness, using co-classification codes contained in patent documents, and examines the patterns of technological diversification of the whole population of firms from the United States, Italy, France, UK, Germany, and Japan patenting to the European Patent Office from 1982 to 1993. Robust evidence is found that knowledge-relatedness is a major feature of firms’ innovative activities.

Networks of inventors and the role of academia: an exploration of Italian patent data

Abstract This paper proposes a quantitative analysis of social distance between Open Science and Proprietary Technology. A few general properties of social networks within both realms are discussed, as they emerge from the new economics of science and recent applied work on “small worlds”. A new data-set on patent inventors is explored, in order to show that social networks within Proprietary Technology are much more fragmented than Open Science ones, except for science-based technologies. Two propositions are then put forward on the “open” behaviour expected from academic inventors , namely university scientists getting involved in Proprietary Technology networks by signing patents. Both propositions are confirmed by data, which show academic inventors to be more central and better connected than non-academic ones. The database and methodology produced for this paper are suggested to be relevant for the more general debate on the role of geographical and cognitive distance in university–industry technology transfer.

Knowledge codification and the geography of innovation: the case of Brescia mechanical cluster

Abstract The paper re-examines the twin concepts of knowledge “tacitness” and “codification”, which both the literature on (broadly defined) industrial districts, and some recent econometric literature on “localized knowledge spillovers” have possibly mis-handled. Even within specialized local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) clusters, knowledge may be highly codified and firm-specific. The case study on Brescia mechanical firms shows that knowledge, rather than flowing freely within the cluster boundaries, circulates within a few smaller “epistemic communities”, each centered around the mechanical engineers of individual machine producers, and spanning to a selected number of suppliers’ and customers’ technicians. Physical distance among members of each community vary a lot, but even local messages may be highly codified.

THE SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTIVITY OF ACADEMIC INVENTORS: NEW EVIDENCE FROM ITALIAN DATA

We investigate the scientific productivity of Italian academic inventors, namely academic researchers designated as inventors on patent applications to the European Patent Office, 1978–1999. We use a novel longitudinal data set comprising 299 academic inventors, and we match them with an equal number of non-patenting researchers. We enquire whether a trade-off between publishing and patenting, or a trade-off between basic and applied research exists, on the basis of the number and quality of publications. We find no trace of such a trade-off, and find instead a strong and positive relationship between patenting and publishing, even in basic science. Our results suggest, however, that it is not patenting per se that boosts scientific productivity, but the advantage derived from solid links with industry, as the strongest correlation between publishing and patenting activity is found when patents are owned by business partners, rather than individual scientists or their universities.

Knowledge Networks from Patent Data

The economic literature on technical change has increasingly relied upon patent citation data to measure inter-personal knowledge flows. Many doubts exist on whether patent citations really reflect the designated inventors’ knowledge of both their technical fields, and of the other inventors and experts therein: citations, in fact, come mainly from the patent examiners, and possibly the patent applicant’s lawyers, rather than from inventors themselves. Unfortunately, most of the papers dedicated to discussing these interpretation issues deal with USPTO data, whose citation rules are quite exceptional if compared to those of other patent offices. In addition, some confusion exists between the two issues of awareness (whether citing inventors actually knew of the cited patents) and existence of a knowledge flow (whether some information on the contents of the cited patents has however reached the, possibly unaware, citing inventor). Questionnaires addressed to inventors are severely affected by this confusion, and can hardly dispel the existing doubts. We then propose to apply social network analysis to derive maps of social relationships between inventors, and measures of social proximity between cited and citing patents. Logit regressions demonstrate that the probability to observe a citation is positively influenced by such proximity. In order to perform such regressions,however,a specific sampling scheme has to used, which we also illustrate and discuss.

How to kill inventors: testing the Massacrator© algorithm for inventor disambiguation

Inventor disambiguation is an increasingly important issue for users of patent data. We propose and test a number of refinements to the original Massacrator algorithm, originally proposed by Lissoni et al. (The keins database on academic inventors: methodology and contents, 2006) and now applied to APE-INV, a free access database funded by the European Science Foundation. Following Raffo and Lhuillery (Res Policy 38:1617–1627, 2009) we describe disambiguation as a three step process: cleaning&parsing, matching, and filtering. By means of sensitivity analysis, based on MonteCarlo simulations, we show how various filtering criteria can be manipulated in order to obtain optimal combinations of precision and recall (type I and type II errors). We also show how these different combinations generate different results for applications to studies on inventors’ productivity, mobility, and networking; and discuss quality issues related to linguistic issues. The filtering criteria based upon information on inventors’ addresses are sensitive to data quality, while those based upon information on co-inventorship networks are always effective. Details on data access and data quality improvement via feedback collection are also discussed.

The Geography of Knowledge Spillovers: The Role of Inventors’ Mobility Across Firms and in Space

Spatial concentration of knowledge flows is often brought up as a key source of increasing returns to location, and a major explanation for the clusterization of innovation activities. While mainstream economics most often sums up all sources of such concentration under the notion of “localized knowledge spillovers”, evolutionary economic geography addresses the spatial and social dimensions of proximity as separate geographical dimensions. In this spirit, we revisit both the JTH test of the localization of knowledge spillovers (Jaffe et al. 1993) and its extension by Agrawal et al. (2006). We find that inventors who patent across different companies and geographical locations contribute extensively to the observed citation patterns, both directly (through personal self-citations) and indirectly, by linking the various companies via a social network conducive to more citations. We also find that social networks convey knowledge both to the mobile inventors’ current locations, and to the prior ones. We conclude that spatial distance is just a proxy for social distance, of which the professional ties between inventors are an important component.

University Autonomy, the Professor Privilege and Academic Patenting: Italy, 1996–2007

Using data on patent applications at the European Patent Office, we search for trends in academic patenting in Italy, 1996–2007. During this time, Italian universities underwent a radical reform process, which granted them autonomy, and were confronted with a change in IP legislation, which introduced the professor privilege. We find that although the absolute number of academic patents has increased, (i) their weight on total patenting by domestic inventors has not, while (ii) the share of academic patents owned by universities has more than tripled. By means of a set of probit regressions, we show that the conditional probability to observe an academic patent has declined over time. We also find that the rise of university ownership is explained, significantly albeit not exclusively, by the increased autonomy of Italian universities, which has allowed them to introduce explicit IP regulations concerning their staffs inventions. The latter has effectively neutralized the introduction of the professor privilege.

Open Science and University Patenting: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Italian Case

This chapter addresses the issue of university patenting and its impact on the scientific activity of academic researchers. The issue is highly debated in Europe where legislators are trying to design policy instruments to support the technological transfer from university to industry and to create an optimal set of incentives to stimulate scientists’ productivity. The relationship between patenting and publishing may be controversial because there are as many arguments claiming that the relationship is beneficial to both university and industry as reasons to fear that patenting may hinder the free diffusion of scientific knowledge or bias the scientists’ choice of research topics.

Small worlds in networks of inventors and the role of academics: an analysis of France

Using data on patent applications at the European Patent Office, we examine the structural properties of networks of inventors in France in different technologies. We find that the higher the presence of inventors from universities and public research organizations (PROs), the more likely the networks are to exhibit small world properties. University and PRO inventors contribute to reduce average path length insofar they are more mobile (across applicants) than other inventors, thus linking up otherwise disconnected cliques. We achieve these results by implementing an original methodology for detecting small world properties in one-mode projections of two-mode graphs.