Innovation and Patenting within Containerized Liner Shipping

Increasingly, in many industries, companies commercialize their technology and innovations through patenting to gain an edge over competition. Within the maritime sector, while literature on innovation is expanding, issues related to the importance of intangible assets, such as patenting, for the participant firms of the industry remain unaddressed. Utilizing innovational frameworks and patent data withdrawn from European Patent Organization’s (EPO’s) database, the aim of this paper is to investigate the innovative level, in terms of patents granted, of incumbent market actors in liner shipping. Apart from patent counts, this exercise sheds light on the areas to which these patents apply, providing a classification while also investigating additional attributes which relate to patent citations, investors and applicants. Although results indicate a varying degree of utilization of the patenting system amongst liner carriers, they nonetheless affirm to some extent that knowledge creation is a valuable tool in the arsenal of some liner carriers, and that patenting is one of the various means utilized to enhance their market position and achieve a sustained competitive advantage. In addition, findings suggest that liner carriers’ innovative efforts have, based on the forward citations received, some significance, while they focus primarily the development of patented technologies which enhance the operational efficiency of their vessels. In this respect, the investigation undertaken sheds some light and provides a novel perspective on understanding the behaviour and innovative propensity of liner shipping companies.

International patent citations and its firm-led network

This paper presents a database with USPTO patents for selected years between 1991 and 2009, totaling 1,022,490 patents, 786,780 patents with international citations and 4,064,995 cross-border citations - links in our analysis. We evaluate a network from those international links, with nodes that are institutions - patent assignees. The literature review organizes arguments for patent citations as knowledge flows and acknowledges problems such as differences between applicants and examiners citations - an exercise to deal with this problem is presented. This network has firms as the dominant institution. An inter-temporal analysis shows the network growth over time and the preservation of its scale-free structure, evidence of its resilience. Over time, this network evolves, changing the leading sectors in a matrix of interaction between citing and cited patents - indications of changes caused by the emergence of new sectors.

Effects of knowledge spillovers between competitors on patent quality: what patent citations reveal about a global duopoly

This paper analyses the effects on patent quality of a type of spillovers arising from the disclosure of patent information by firms engaged in competition in a global duopoly. Both firms are involved in producing new technologies and they do not cooperate on joint patents. In this context, we explored whether the disclosure of crucial knowledge in the patents of one of the firms affects the patent quality of its respective competitor. The empirical methodology relies on forward citations as an indicator of quality, and backward citations to the competitor as a measure of spillovers. We estimated several count models with a sample of 7750 patent families (divided into subsamples) owned by two large companies, Airbus and Boeing. Our econometric findings show that, for technologies in which the two firms account for the majority of the global patents, neither of the firms in the duopoly was able to harness spillovers from the rival to improve the quality of its patents. However, knowledge from the competitor becomes relevant, at least for one of the focal firms, in explaining patent quality of other technologies in which the two firms do not exert a dominant position.

New Indicators of the Technological Impact of Scientific Production

Purpose Building upon pioneering work by Francis Narin and others, a new methodological approach to assessing the technological impact of scientific research is presented. Design/methodology/approach It is based on the analysis of citations made in patent families included in the PATSTAT database that is to scientific papers indexed in Scopus. Findings An advanced citation matching procedure is applied to the data in order to construct two indicators of technological impact: on the citing (patent) side, the country/region in which protection is sought and a patent family's propensity to cite scientific papers are taken into account, and on the cited (paper) side, a relative citation rate is defined for patent citations to papers that is similar to the scientific paper-to-paper citation rate in classical bibliometrics. Research limitations The results are limited by the available data, in our case Scopus and PATSTAT, and especially by the lack of standardization of references in patents. This required a matching procedure that is neither trivial nor exact. Practical implications Results at the country/region, document type, and publication age levels are presented. The country/region-level results in particular reveal features that have remained hidden in analyses of straight counts. Especially notable is that the rankings of some Asian countries/regions move upwards when the proposed normalized indicator of technological impact is applied as against the case with straight counts of patent citations to those countries/regions’ published papers. Originality/value In our opinion, the level of sophistication of the indicators proposed in the current paper is unparalleled in the scientific literature, and provides a solid basis for the assessment of the technological impact of scientific research in countries/regions and institutions.

Does income redistribution impede innovation?

Economic inequalities have been increasing in many countries since the 1980s provoking calls for more income redistribution. One argument against increased redistribution is that it could hamper innovation and technological progress. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that empirically investigates the relationship between government redistributive policies at the top of income distribution and innovative activity in a panel of countries. We use new,high-quality and cross-country comparable panel data on income redistribution from distributional national accounts. The sample covers 34 advanced and emerging countries over 1980-2010. We do not find any negative impact of the redistributive effect on innovation in the crosscountry setting. This result is robust to the use of various measures of income redistribution and patent-based indicators of innovation (patent counts, patent citations and patent originality).

Linking science to technology: the “patent paper citation” and the rise of patentometrics in the 1980s

PurposeIn this article, the ideas and methods behind the “patent-paper citation” are scrutinised by following the intellectual and technical development of approaches and ideas in early work on patentometrics. The aim is to study how references from patents to papers came to play a crucial role in establishing a link between science and technology.Design/methodology/approachThe study comprises a conceptual history of the “patent paper citation” and its emergence as an important indicator of science and technology interaction. By tracing key references in the field, it analyses the overarching frameworks and ideas, the conceptual “hinterland”, in which the approach of studying patent references emerged.FindingsThe analysis explains how interest in patents – not only as legal and economic artefacts but also as scientific documents – became evident in the 1980s. The focus on patent citations was sparked by a need for relevant and objective indicators and by the greater availability of databases and methods. Yet, the development of patentometrics also relied on earlier research, and established theories, on the relation between science and technology.Originality/valueThis is the first attempt at situating patentometrics in a larger societal and scientific context. The paper offers a reflexive and nuanced analysis of the “patent-paper citation” as a theoretical and historical construct, and it calls for a broader and contextualised understanding of patent references, including their social, legal and rhetorical function.

Knowledge Spillovers and Corporate Investment in Scientific Research

Using data on 800,000 corporate publications and patent citations to these publications between 1980 and 2015, we study how corporate investment in research is linked to its use in the firm’s inventions, and to spillovers to rivals. We find that private returns to corporate research depend on the balance between two opposing forces: the benefits from the use of science in own downstream inventions, and the costs of spillovers to rivals. Consistent with this, firms produce more research when it is used internally, but less research when it is used by rivals. As firms become more sensitive to rivals using their science, they are likely to reduce the share of research in R&D. (JEL D22, D25, G31, I23, O31, O33, O34)