ABSTRACT This paper examines the linkage between patenting and export performance for selected co... more ABSTRACT This paper examines the linkage between patenting and export performance for selected countries at the level of technology fields. Some empirical studies show considerable correlation between the patenting behavior of countries and their economic success in international markets. Adding to the existing literature, the aim of this analysis is to assess whether the indicators that are supposed to reflect patent value—such as patent citations or family size—have any explanatory power in estimating the export value of countries by technology fields. For this study, a panel dataset was compiled consisting of annual data (1988–2007) on international trade from the UN-COMTRADE database and patent data from the EPO Worldwide Patent Statistical Database (PATSTAT). The results show that exports are a very useful way of placing a valuation on patents. Patents and exports are strongly correlated, although there are visible deviations from this parallelism. IPC classes and inventor counts prove not to be relevant in predicting the export value of patents, while family size has restricted predictive power. When analyzing patent applications, forward citations, in particular, are more promising than granted patents.
Today's theories and models on innovation stress the importance of scientific capabilities and sc... more Today's theories and models on innovation stress the importance of scientific capabilities and science-technology proximity, especially in new emerging fields of economic activity. In this contribution we examine the relationship between national scientific capabilities, the science intensity of technology and technological performance within six promising industrial fields. Our findings reveal that national technological performance is positively associated with scientific capabilities. Countries performing better on a technological level are characterized both by larger numbers of publications and by numbers of involved institutions that exceed average expected values. The latter observation holds for both companies and knowledge generating institutes actively involved in scientific activities. As such, our findings seem to suggest beneficial effects of scientific capabilities shouldered by a multitude of organizations. In addition, higher numbers of patent activity coincide with higher levels of science intensity pointing out the relevance of science 'proximity' when developing technology in newer, emerging fields. Limitations and directions for further research are discussed.
Relying on patent information, we map the presence and impact of universities in technological la... more Relying on patent information, we map the presence and impact of universities in technological landscapes across several major countries and fields. The creation of academic technology is examined by analysing patents applied for by universities. The 'use' of academically owned technologies is assessed through citations from industrially owned patents towards university patents. Considering simultaneously the creation and use of academic technology allows to assess to what extent the creation of academic technology coincides with its subsequent 'use' including the role played by geographic proximity in this respect. Our findings reveal a dominance of American universities in terms of creating academic technology, particularly in terms of highly cited academic patents. US firms dominate in terms of citing academic technologies. They limit themselves not to American universities. . European and Asian countries vary considerably in terms of creation and use of academic technology and display a more outspoken 'home bias'.
This paper investigates whether firms active in biotechnology can improve their technological per... more This paper investigates whether firms active in biotechnology can improve their technological performance by being present in regions that host a concentration of similar technological activity. Biotechnology clusters are identified at the level of US states, Japanese prefectures and European NUTS2 regions. Based on a panel data set of 59 consolidated biopharmaceutical firms (period 1995-2002), we find empirical evidence for
This paper investigates whether firms active in biotechnology can improve their technological per... more This paper investigates whether firms active in biotechnology can improve their technological performance by developing R&D activities in technology clusters. Regions that host a concentration of biotechnology activity are identified as technology clusters (level of US states, Japanese prefectures and European NUTS2 regions). A fixed effect panel data analysis on a set of 59 biopharmaceutical firms (period 1995-2002) provides evidence
Technological diversification at the level of the firm, i.e. the expansion of a firm’s technology... more Technological diversification at the level of the firm, i.e. the expansion of a firm’s technology base into a wide range of technology fields, is found to be a prevailing phenomenon in all three major industrialized regions: US, Europe and Japan, prompting the term multi-technology corporation. Whereas previous studies have provided insights into the composition of technology portfolios of multi-technology firms,
Firms active in knowledge-intensive fields are increasingly organizing their R&D activities on an... more Firms active in knowledge-intensive fields are increasingly organizing their R&D activities on an international scale. This paper investigates whether firms active in biotechnology can improve their technological performance by developing R&D activities in multiple technology clusters. Regions in the US, Japan and Europe, that host a concentration of biotechnology activity are identified as clusters. Fixed-effect panel data analyses with 59
Within the innovation literature, inter-organizational collaboration is being advanced as instrum... more Within the innovation literature, inter-organizational collaboration is being advanced as instrumental for improving the innovative performance of firms. In addition inter-organizational collaboration can be instrumental for addressing the multiple requirements innovation strategies entail. At the same time -large scaleempirical evidence for such a relation is scarce. Within this paper we examine whether evidence can be found for the idea that inter-organizational collaboration supports the effectiveness of innovation strategies. Multivariate and Tobit analyses of data on Belgian manufacturing firms, collected by means of the CIS survey (n=221), reveals a positive relationship between inter-organizational collaboration and innovative performance. Moreover the fmdings reported here suggest the relevancy of adopting a portfolio approach towards inter-organizational collaboration.
Uitgave van de Vlaamse Raad voor Wetenschapsbeleid (VRWB) K. Vinck, voorzitter D. Raspoet, secret... more Uitgave van de Vlaamse Raad voor Wetenschapsbeleid (VRWB) K. Vinck, voorzitter D. Raspoet, secretaris VRWB-secretariaat North Plaza B -Koning Albert II-laan 7 (4e verd.) 1210 Brussel tel. +32(0)2 553 45 20 fax +32(0)2 553 45 23
... This result indicates that explorative and exploitative collaborations have different effects... more ... This result indicates that explorative and exploitative collaborations have different effects on afirm's innovation strategies. This section will extend this reasoning, developing hypotheses about the particular effects of both explorative and exploitative collaboration on the ...
In this pilot study we examine the performance of text-based profiling in recovering a set of val... more In this pilot study we examine the performance of text-based profiling in recovering a set of validated inventor-author links. In a first step we match patents and publications based solely on their similarity in content. Next, we compare inventor and author names on the highest ranked matches for the occurrence of name matches. Finally, we compare these candidate matches with the names listed in a validated set of inventor-author names. Our text-based profiling method performs significantly better than random matching of patents and publications, suggesting that text-based profiling is a valuable complementary tool to the name searches used in previous studies.
Patent documents are one of the most comprehensive data sources on technology development. As suc... more Patent documents are one of the most comprehensive data sources on technology development. As such, they provide a unique source of information to analyze and monitor technological performance. Patent indicators are now used by companies and by policy and government agencies alike to assess technological progress on the level of regions, countries, domains, and even specific entities such as companies,
When innovating, interaction is beneficial for (1) exploring problem definition spaces and (2) ex... more When innovating, interaction is beneficial for (1) exploring problem definition spaces and (2) exploiting them. The social processes in which both activities unfold, display paradoxical characteristics which can be addressed by introducing space and time as (organizational) design variables. Complementary arrangements that connect space and time are needed in order for such organizational forms to be sustainable. Propositions in this
When innovating, interaction is beneficial for (1) exploring problem definition spaces and (2) ex... more When innovating, interaction is beneficial for (1) exploring problem definition spaces and (2) exploiting them. The social processes in which both activities unfold, display paradoxical characteristics which can be addressed by introducing space and time as (organizational) design variables. Complementary arrangements that connect space and time
In this study we conduct a thorough assessment of the LSA text mining method and its options (pre... more In this study we conduct a thorough assessment of the LSA text mining method and its options (preprocessing, weighting, …) to grasp similarities between patent documents and scientific publications to develop a new method to detect direct science‐technology linkages ‐ as this is instrumental for research on topics in innovation management, e.g. anti‐ commons issues. We want to assess effectiveness (in terms of precision and recall) and derive best practices on weighting and dimensionality reduction for application on patent data. We use LSA to derive similarity from a large set of patent and scientific publication documents (88,248 patent documents and 948,432 scientific publications) based on 40 similarity measurement variants (four weighting schemas are combined with ten levels of dimensionality reduction and the cosine metric). A thorough validation is set up to compare the performance of those measure variants (expert validation of 300 combinations plus a control set of 30,000 p...
Manufacturing firms often diversify into related service activities due to expected leverage effe... more Manufacturing firms often diversify into related service activities due to expected leverage effects of existing technological expertise, customer relationships and brand identity. Previous research has conceived this process as one-directional, whereby the installed product base in the end defines the boundaries of service diversification.
Today's theories and models on innovation stress the importance of scientific capabilities and sc... more Today's theories and models on innovation stress the importance of scientific capabilities and science-technology proximity, especially in new emerging fields of economic activity. In this contribution we examine the relationship between national scientific capabilities, the science intensity of technology and technological performance within six promising industrial fields. Our findings reveal that national technological performance is positively associated with scientific capabilities. Countries performing better on a technological level are characterized both by larger numbers of publications and by numbers of involved institutions that exceed average expected values. The latter observation holds for both companies and knowledge generating institutes actively involved in scientific activities. As such, our findings seem to suggest beneficial effects of scientific capabilities shouldered by a multitude of organizations. In addition, higher numbers of patent activity coincide with higher levels of science intensity pointing out the relevance of science 'proximity' when developing technology in newer, emerging fields. Limitations and directions for further research are discussed.
ABSTRACT This paper examines the linkage between patenting and export performance for selected co... more ABSTRACT This paper examines the linkage between patenting and export performance for selected countries at the level of technology fields. Some empirical studies show considerable correlation between the patenting behavior of countries and their economic success in international markets. Adding to the existing literature, the aim of this analysis is to assess whether the indicators that are supposed to reflect patent value—such as patent citations or family size—have any explanatory power in estimating the export value of countries by technology fields. For this study, a panel dataset was compiled consisting of annual data (1988–2007) on international trade from the UN-COMTRADE database and patent data from the EPO Worldwide Patent Statistical Database (PATSTAT). The results show that exports are a very useful way of placing a valuation on patents. Patents and exports are strongly correlated, although there are visible deviations from this parallelism. IPC classes and inventor counts prove not to be relevant in predicting the export value of patents, while family size has restricted predictive power. When analyzing patent applications, forward citations, in particular, are more promising than granted patents.
Today's theories and models on innovation stress the importance of scientific capabilities and sc... more Today's theories and models on innovation stress the importance of scientific capabilities and science-technology proximity, especially in new emerging fields of economic activity. In this contribution we examine the relationship between national scientific capabilities, the science intensity of technology and technological performance within six promising industrial fields. Our findings reveal that national technological performance is positively associated with scientific capabilities. Countries performing better on a technological level are characterized both by larger numbers of publications and by numbers of involved institutions that exceed average expected values. The latter observation holds for both companies and knowledge generating institutes actively involved in scientific activities. As such, our findings seem to suggest beneficial effects of scientific capabilities shouldered by a multitude of organizations. In addition, higher numbers of patent activity coincide with higher levels of science intensity pointing out the relevance of science 'proximity' when developing technology in newer, emerging fields. Limitations and directions for further research are discussed.
Relying on patent information, we map the presence and impact of universities in technological la... more Relying on patent information, we map the presence and impact of universities in technological landscapes across several major countries and fields. The creation of academic technology is examined by analysing patents applied for by universities. The 'use' of academically owned technologies is assessed through citations from industrially owned patents towards university patents. Considering simultaneously the creation and use of academic technology allows to assess to what extent the creation of academic technology coincides with its subsequent 'use' including the role played by geographic proximity in this respect. Our findings reveal a dominance of American universities in terms of creating academic technology, particularly in terms of highly cited academic patents. US firms dominate in terms of citing academic technologies. They limit themselves not to American universities. . European and Asian countries vary considerably in terms of creation and use of academic technology and display a more outspoken 'home bias'.
This paper investigates whether firms active in biotechnology can improve their technological per... more This paper investigates whether firms active in biotechnology can improve their technological performance by being present in regions that host a concentration of similar technological activity. Biotechnology clusters are identified at the level of US states, Japanese prefectures and European NUTS2 regions. Based on a panel data set of 59 consolidated biopharmaceutical firms (period 1995-2002), we find empirical evidence for
This paper investigates whether firms active in biotechnology can improve their technological per... more This paper investigates whether firms active in biotechnology can improve their technological performance by developing R&D activities in technology clusters. Regions that host a concentration of biotechnology activity are identified as technology clusters (level of US states, Japanese prefectures and European NUTS2 regions). A fixed effect panel data analysis on a set of 59 biopharmaceutical firms (period 1995-2002) provides evidence
Technological diversification at the level of the firm, i.e. the expansion of a firm’s technology... more Technological diversification at the level of the firm, i.e. the expansion of a firm’s technology base into a wide range of technology fields, is found to be a prevailing phenomenon in all three major industrialized regions: US, Europe and Japan, prompting the term multi-technology corporation. Whereas previous studies have provided insights into the composition of technology portfolios of multi-technology firms,
Firms active in knowledge-intensive fields are increasingly organizing their R&D activities on an... more Firms active in knowledge-intensive fields are increasingly organizing their R&D activities on an international scale. This paper investigates whether firms active in biotechnology can improve their technological performance by developing R&D activities in multiple technology clusters. Regions in the US, Japan and Europe, that host a concentration of biotechnology activity are identified as clusters. Fixed-effect panel data analyses with 59
Within the innovation literature, inter-organizational collaboration is being advanced as instrum... more Within the innovation literature, inter-organizational collaboration is being advanced as instrumental for improving the innovative performance of firms. In addition inter-organizational collaboration can be instrumental for addressing the multiple requirements innovation strategies entail. At the same time -large scaleempirical evidence for such a relation is scarce. Within this paper we examine whether evidence can be found for the idea that inter-organizational collaboration supports the effectiveness of innovation strategies. Multivariate and Tobit analyses of data on Belgian manufacturing firms, collected by means of the CIS survey (n=221), reveals a positive relationship between inter-organizational collaboration and innovative performance. Moreover the fmdings reported here suggest the relevancy of adopting a portfolio approach towards inter-organizational collaboration.
Uitgave van de Vlaamse Raad voor Wetenschapsbeleid (VRWB) K. Vinck, voorzitter D. Raspoet, secret... more Uitgave van de Vlaamse Raad voor Wetenschapsbeleid (VRWB) K. Vinck, voorzitter D. Raspoet, secretaris VRWB-secretariaat North Plaza B -Koning Albert II-laan 7 (4e verd.) 1210 Brussel tel. +32(0)2 553 45 20 fax +32(0)2 553 45 23
... This result indicates that explorative and exploitative collaborations have different effects... more ... This result indicates that explorative and exploitative collaborations have different effects on afirm's innovation strategies. This section will extend this reasoning, developing hypotheses about the particular effects of both explorative and exploitative collaboration on the ...
In this pilot study we examine the performance of text-based profiling in recovering a set of val... more In this pilot study we examine the performance of text-based profiling in recovering a set of validated inventor-author links. In a first step we match patents and publications based solely on their similarity in content. Next, we compare inventor and author names on the highest ranked matches for the occurrence of name matches. Finally, we compare these candidate matches with the names listed in a validated set of inventor-author names. Our text-based profiling method performs significantly better than random matching of patents and publications, suggesting that text-based profiling is a valuable complementary tool to the name searches used in previous studies.
Patent documents are one of the most comprehensive data sources on technology development. As suc... more Patent documents are one of the most comprehensive data sources on technology development. As such, they provide a unique source of information to analyze and monitor technological performance. Patent indicators are now used by companies and by policy and government agencies alike to assess technological progress on the level of regions, countries, domains, and even specific entities such as companies,
When innovating, interaction is beneficial for (1) exploring problem definition spaces and (2) ex... more When innovating, interaction is beneficial for (1) exploring problem definition spaces and (2) exploiting them. The social processes in which both activities unfold, display paradoxical characteristics which can be addressed by introducing space and time as (organizational) design variables. Complementary arrangements that connect space and time are needed in order for such organizational forms to be sustainable. Propositions in this
When innovating, interaction is beneficial for (1) exploring problem definition spaces and (2) ex... more When innovating, interaction is beneficial for (1) exploring problem definition spaces and (2) exploiting them. The social processes in which both activities unfold, display paradoxical characteristics which can be addressed by introducing space and time as (organizational) design variables. Complementary arrangements that connect space and time
In this study we conduct a thorough assessment of the LSA text mining method and its options (pre... more In this study we conduct a thorough assessment of the LSA text mining method and its options (preprocessing, weighting, …) to grasp similarities between patent documents and scientific publications to develop a new method to detect direct science‐technology linkages ‐ as this is instrumental for research on topics in innovation management, e.g. anti‐ commons issues. We want to assess effectiveness (in terms of precision and recall) and derive best practices on weighting and dimensionality reduction for application on patent data. We use LSA to derive similarity from a large set of patent and scientific publication documents (88,248 patent documents and 948,432 scientific publications) based on 40 similarity measurement variants (four weighting schemas are combined with ten levels of dimensionality reduction and the cosine metric). A thorough validation is set up to compare the performance of those measure variants (expert validation of 300 combinations plus a control set of 30,000 p...
Manufacturing firms often diversify into related service activities due to expected leverage effe... more Manufacturing firms often diversify into related service activities due to expected leverage effects of existing technological expertise, customer relationships and brand identity. Previous research has conceived this process as one-directional, whereby the installed product base in the end defines the boundaries of service diversification.
Today's theories and models on innovation stress the importance of scientific capabilities and sc... more Today's theories and models on innovation stress the importance of scientific capabilities and science-technology proximity, especially in new emerging fields of economic activity. In this contribution we examine the relationship between national scientific capabilities, the science intensity of technology and technological performance within six promising industrial fields. Our findings reveal that national technological performance is positively associated with scientific capabilities. Countries performing better on a technological level are characterized both by larger numbers of publications and by numbers of involved institutions that exceed average expected values. The latter observation holds for both companies and knowledge generating institutes actively involved in scientific activities. As such, our findings seem to suggest beneficial effects of scientific capabilities shouldered by a multitude of organizations. In addition, higher numbers of patent activity coincide with higher levels of science intensity pointing out the relevance of science 'proximity' when developing technology in newer, emerging fields. Limitations and directions for further research are discussed.
Increasingly, manufacturing firms are turning to services as a new way of creating and capturing ... more Increasingly, manufacturing firms are turning to services as a new way of creating and capturing value. Despite the potential benefits, evidence suggests that many new product-service providers struggle to deploy service activities effectively, not least because they fail to reflect the presence of service activities in their performance management systems (PMS). This paper reports the results of an in-depth case study, which examines how manufacturers can steer the transition towards services. Our findings suggest that manufacturing firms need to emphasize two separate but related dimensions of the market performance of service activities: 'service adoption', reflecting the proportion of customers who purchase the manufacturer's services, and 'service coverage', signaling the range of service elements or the comprehensiveness of the service contract that customers opt for. These two indicators, reflecting service market performance, should be supplemented with a 'complementarity index' designed to disclose whether the relationship between products and services is reinforcing or substitutive. This is particularly important, since a common concern expressed by manufacturers is that increasing their service activities may cannibalize their product activities. Combined, these indicators allow manufacturing firms to deploy a service-based business model in an integrated and sustainable manner.
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Papers by Bart Van Looy