The ‘inventor balance’ and the functional specialization in global inventive activities
Abstract
Inventors and organizational assets are inputs of inventive activities which are often provided at a global scale, where countries might specialize in the provision of one or the other type of inputs. We introduce a new patent-based metric, the 'inventor balance', to quantify this type of functional specialization, which we discover to be considerable, and we propose a conceptual framework to explain it. We observe a progressive 'decoupling' of national sub-systems providing respectively inventors and organizational assets. Moreover, we find that countries with a high level of innovativeness relative to their economic development, high technological specialization, and strong individualistic cultural traits, contribute relatively more inventors than organizations to the global production of inventions.
Citation
Picci , L & Savorelli , L 2018 , ' The ‘inventor balance’ and the functional specialization in global inventive activities ' , Economics of Innovation and New Technology , vol. 27 , no. 1 , pp. 39-61 . https://doi.org/10.1080/10438599.2017.1293598
Publication
Economics of Innovation and New Technology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1043-8599Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10438599.2017.1293598
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.