DAT: Creating a Patent Collaboration Network Database to Examine the Social Production of Knowledge

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Despite evidence that innovation has become increasingly collaborative, our understanding of collaborative creativity and its impact on economic productivity remains incomplete. For example, how should firms structure the collaborations of their inventors, given that networks which enhance the generation of a new idea also appear to hamper the dissemination of that idea? How does knowledge flow within and between regions and how can policy makers influence those flows for maximal social welfare? How does investment in scientific research result in peer-reviewed publication, the diffusion of knowledge, invention, and patenting, and ultimate gains in economic productivity? These questions remain unanswered because social network data are difficult to gather, particularly across time, space, and boundaries. This proposal allows answering these questions by calculating and posting millions of relational data, based on all co-authorship ties between inventors of U.S. patents, from 1963 through the present. The database complements the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) patent database by providing the social networks of patent co-authorships. It creates a standard social network patent database at the individual inventor and aggregate levels including organizational, regional, and technological. It reduces barriers to entry to scholars who lack the requisite programming skills and hardware to create the data on their own and enables real time graphing of patent co-authorship networks. It provides a website by which actual inventors can assess the accuracy of the algorithms used to uniquely identify them in the patent database. Finally, the project provides data on a public website accessible by scholars, business analysts, and students. Just as the original NBER database has unleashed broad and diverse scholarship on innovation (over 500 papers cite it, according to Google Scholar, by early 2008), the social network database project will unleash a similar wave of research, focused on collaborative creativity and the social networks of inventors and their organizations. Broader Impacts: The research will publish social network data from all U.S. patent co-authorships (1963-present) for use by researchers, students, and business analysts. It will provide real-time ability to visually illustrate these networks, with a variety of variables illustrated by color and size of the nodes and co-authorship links. It will enable answering how managers should structure collaborative relationships and how information flows across organizational, regional, and technological boundaries. It will enable tracing the career productivity and mobility of millions of inventors around the world. In conjunction with other databases on research grants and scientific publication, it will illuminate the process of knowledge creation and dissemination at many levels of analysis, from the individual, to the organizational, and international. The primary purpose of this project is to make social network data, based on the co-authorship of U.S. patents from 1963 through the present, available to researchers and the public at large. The plan, within six months of project start, is to make the data available from the Harvard MIT Data Center. The data will also be archived in the Henry A. Murray Research Archive. Raw data and the source code will be included in these postings.