IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hit/iirwps/22-06.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The determinants of parallel invention : Measuring the role of information sharing and personal interaction between inventors

Author

Listed:
  • Kang, Byeongwoo
  • Bekkers, Rudi

Abstract

Historical accounts describe numerous cases of parallel invention. Nowadays, with over half a million inventions yearly that apply for patent protection at the USPTO alone, it is likely that there are a lot of parallel inventions among these. Yet, the mechanisms behind creating similar knowledge remain unstudied. From both a theoretical and practical perspective, it is an interesting question to what degree parallel inventions take place truly independent of each other, or whether they are the result of the exchange of knowledge and ideas between inventors. In our empirical study, we use the unique setting of technical standardization, where it is possible to systematically observe knowledge sharing as well as knowledge exchanges between inventors in detail. This study presents two novel analyses, one focussing on the determinants of similar inventions (using an AI-based approach) and one on the determinants of identical inventions (exploiting data from the patent granting procedure). In both analyses, we find positive and significant effects for knowledge sharing as well as for inventor interaction as determinants. The latter effect is the strongest: if meet in person and discuss their ideas, the likelihood of similar inventions increases up to a factor of approximately five, to up to 2.3 percentage points. Empirically confirming the theoretical work of Amabile (1983, 1988) on knowledge creation at the individual level and that of Nonaka (1994, 2006) on knowledge creation at the organizational level, we reflect on the implications of our findings for companies wishing to increase their inventive efforts.

Suggested Citation

  • Kang, Byeongwoo & Bekkers, Rudi, 2022. "The determinants of parallel invention : Measuring the role of information sharing and personal interaction between inventors," IIR Working Paper 22-06, Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University.
    • Handle: RePEc:hit:iirwps:22-06
    Note: November 1st, 2022
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hermes-ir.lib.hit-u.ac.jp/hermes/ir/re/78434/070iirWP22-06.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Justus Baron & Kirti Gupta, 2018. "Unpacking 3GPP standards," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(3), pages 433-461, September.
    2. Xuefeng Wang & Huichao Ren & Yun Chen & Yuqin Liu & Yali Qiao & Ying Huang, 2019. "Measuring patent similarity with SAO semantic analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(1), pages 1-23, October.
    3. Stephen L. Jones & Aija Leiponen & Gurneeta Vasudeva, 2021. "The evolution of cooperation in the face of conflict: Evidence from the innovation ecosystem for mobile telecom standards development," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 42(4), pages 710-740, April.
    4. Manuel Trajtenberg, 1990. "A Penny for Your Quotes: Patent Citations and the Value of Innovations," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 21(1), pages 172-187, Spring.
    5. Ikujiro Nonaka, 1994. "A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 5(1), pages 14-37, February.
    6. Bekkers, Rudi & Martinelli, Arianna & Tamagni, Federico, 2020. "The impact of including standards-related documentation in patent prior art: Evidence from an EPO policy change," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 49(7).
    7. Arts, Sam & Hou, Jianan & Gomez, Juan Carlos, 2021. "Natural language processing to identify the creation and impact of new technologies in patent text: Code, data, and new measures," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 50(2).
    8. Kang, Byeongwoo & Motohashi, Kazuyuki, 2015. "Essential intellectual property rights and inventors’ involvement in standardization," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 44(2), pages 483-492.
    9. Omachi, Masayoshi & 大町, 真義, 2004. "Emergence of Essential Patents in Technical Standards: Implications of the Continuation and Divisional Application Systems and the Written Description Requirement," IIR Working Paper 05-02, Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University.
    10. Justus Baron & Tim Pohlmann, 2018. "Mapping standards to patents using declarations of standard‐essential patents," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(3), pages 504-534, September.
    11. Kang, Byeongwoo & Bekkers, Rudi, 2015. "Just-in-time patents and the development of standards," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 44(10), pages 1948-1961.
    12. Sam Arts & Bruno Cassiman & Juan Carlos Gomez, 2018. "Text matching to measure patent similarity," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(1), pages 62-84, January.
    13. Aija Elina Leiponen, 2008. "Competing Through Cooperation: The Organization of Standard Setting in Wireless Telecommunications," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 54(11), pages 1904-1919, November.
    14. Johansson, Magnus & Kärreman, Matts & Foukaki, Amalia, 2019. "Research and development resources, coopetitive performance and cooperation: The case of standardization in 3GPP, 2004–2013," Technovation, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    15. Nagaoka, Sadao & Motohashi, Kazuyuki & Goto, Akira, 2010. "Patent Statistics as an Innovation Indicator," Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, in: Bronwyn H. Hall & Nathan Rosenberg (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1083-1127, Elsevier.
    16. Karki, M. M. S., 1997. "Patent citation analysis: A policy analysis tool," World Patent Information, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 269-272, December.
    17. Michaël Bikard, 2020. "Idea twins: Simultaneous discoveries as a research tool," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(8), pages 1528-1543, August.
    18. Hamid Bekamiri & Daniel S. Hain & Roman Jurowetzki, 2021. "PatentSBERTa: A Deep NLP based Hybrid Model for Patent Distance and Classification using Augmented SBERT," Papers 2103.11933, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2021.
    19. Fudenberg, Drew & Gilbert, Richard & Stiglitz, Joseph & Tirole, Jean, 1983. "Preemption, leapfrogging and competition in patent races," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 3-31, June.
    20. Harhoff, Dietmar & Gambardella, Alfonso & Verspagen, Bart, 2008. "The Value of European Patents," CEPR Discussion Papers 6848, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    21. Berger, Florian & Blind, Knut & Thumm, Nikolaus, 2012. "Filing behaviour regarding essential patents in industry standards," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 41(1), pages 216-225.
    22. Czarnitzki, Dirk & Hussinger, Katrin & Leten, Bart, 2011. "The market value of blocking patent citations," ZEW Discussion Papers 11-021, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    23. Mariagrazia Squicciarini & Hélène Dernis & Chiara Criscuolo, 2013. "Measuring Patent Quality: Indicators of Technological and Economic Value," OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers 2013/3, OECD Publishing.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Cesare Righi & Timothy Simcoe, 2020. "Patenting Inventions or Inventing Patents? Continuation Practice at the USPTO," NBER Working Papers 27686, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Harhoff, Dietmar & Brachtendorf, Lorenz & Gaessler, Fabian, 2020. "Truly Standard-Essential Patents? A Semantics-Based Analysis," CEPR Discussion Papers 14726, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    3. Cesare Righi & Timothy Simcoe, 2022. "Patenting inventions or inventing patents? Continuation practice at the USPTO," Economics Working Papers 1820, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    4. Cesare Righi & Timothy Simcoe, 2022. "Patenting Inventions or Inventing Patents? Continuation Practice at the USPTO," Working Papers 1320, Barcelona School of Economics.
    5. Kang, Byeongwoo & Bekkers, Rudi, 2015. "Just-in-time patents and the development of standards," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 44(10), pages 1948-1961.
    6. Byeongwoo Kang & Rudi Bekkers, 2013. "Just-in-time inventions and the development of standards: How firms use opportunistic strategies to obtain standard-essential patents (SEPs)," Working Papers 13-01, Eindhoven Center for Innovation Studies, revised Feb 2013.
    7. Justus Baron & Jorge Contreras & Martin Husovec & Pierre Larouche, 2019. "Making the Rules: The Governance of Standard Development Organizations and their Policies on Intellectual Property Rights," JRC Research Reports JRC115004, Joint Research Centre.
    8. Baron, Justus, 2020. "Counting standard contributions to measure the value of patent portfolios - A tale of apples and oranges," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 44(3).
    9. Justus Baron & Tim Pohlmann, 2018. "Mapping standards to patents using declarations of standard‐essential patents," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(3), pages 504-534, September.
    10. Schott, Lennart & Schaefer, Kerstin J., 2023. "Acceptance of Chinese latecomers' technological contributions in international ICT standardization — The role of origin, experience and collaboration," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 52(1).
    11. Lorenz Brachtendorf & Fabian Gaessler & Dietmar Harhoff, 2023. "Truly standard‐essential patents? A semantics‐based analysis," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(1), pages 132-157, January.
    12. Bekkers, Rudi & Martinelli, Arianna & Tamagni, Federico, 2020. "The impact of including standards-related documentation in patent prior art: Evidence from an EPO policy change," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 49(7).
    13. Heikkilä, Jussi & Rissanen, Julius & Ali-Vehmas, Timo, 2023. "Coopetition, standardization and general purpose technologies: A framework and an application," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 47(4).
    14. Kim, Dong-hyu, 2022. "Effects of catch-up and incumbent firms’ SEP strategic manoeuvres," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(5).
    15. Gamarra, Yanis Luca & Friedl, Gunther, 2023. "Declared essential patents and average total R&D expenditures per patent family," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 47(7).
    16. Cesare Righi & Davide Cannito & Theodor Vladasel, 2023. "Continuing Patent Applications at the USPTO," Working Papers 1382, Barcelona School of Economics.
    17. Pfister, Curdin & Koomen, Miriam & Harhoff, Dietmar & Backes-Gellner, Uschi, 2021. "Regional innovation effects of applied research institutions," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 50(4).
    18. Wiegmann, Paul Moritz & Eggers, Felix & de Vries, Henk J. & Blind, Knut, 2022. "Competing Standard-Setting Organizations: A Choice Experiment," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(2).
    19. Hussinger, Katrin & Schwiebacher, Franz, 2013. "The value of disclosing IPR to open standard setting organizations," ZEW Discussion Papers 13-060, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    20. Cesare Righi & Davide Cannito & Theodor Vladasel, 2023. "Continuing patent applications at the USPTO," Economics Working Papers 1855, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Creativity; Idea twin; Knowledge creation; Patent similarity; Similar knowledge;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O31 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hit:iirwps:22-06. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Digital Resources Section, Hitotsubashi University Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iihitjp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.