International Specialization Dynamics

6Technological Landscapes Analysis: Europe, 2010–2012

6.1. Introduction

The provision of data on patent applications for the 2,000 leading global groups in terms of R&D spending (EC-JRC/OECD COR&DIP© Database, v.0. 2015. See [DER 15]) opens new perspectives for the study of technology and inter-regional knowledge flows. In the previous chapter, we have shown that it is possible to combine “technologies” and “regions” aspects to obtain an unified interpretation of structures and localized cognitive dynamics. In what follows, we add the “companies” aspect to the analysis and produce a first set of findings on the European technologies market (European Patent Office, EPO) for the period 2010–2012. To do this, we combine the COR&DIP © v.0. database with two other information sources: REGPAT (OECD, February 2016 release) for the regional aspect, and PATSTAT (EPO, fall 2014 release) for the technology aspect. After merging these databases, we obtain the following numbers for this period:

• – REGPAT lists 375,542 patent applications geographically localized at EPO between 2010 and 2012. The COR&DIP © v.0. database includes 123,930 patent applications filed with the EPO by the 2,000 groups on the same dates. We asked to obtain information on the technologies to which they belong and the same information for their citations (via PATSTAT). The merging of these databases generates an intersection of 29,290 unique patents per 1,006 groups. About a quarter of COR&DIP© v.0. patents are simultaneously ...