Systemic Innovation

6Technologies and Inter-industrial Collaborations: A Patent Analysis

6.1. Introduction

This chapter seeks to map global inter-industry technology collaborations over the recent period. It considers these research and development (R&D) collaborations using data on patent co-filings. A co-filed patent (or co-patent) is the result of a collaborative action where the actors share the property rights of an invention. This quantitative approach has recently been used by Frigant et al. (2019) to identify the geographical boundaries of fuel cell innovation technology systems that include major car manufacturers and their R&D partners (SMEs, public research centers, etc.). Here, our use of co-patent data extends and restricts, at the same time, the scope of what Frigant et al. present. We are expanding in the sense that we are not limiting ourselves to a single technical system, but to all those that our data report. At the same time, we restrict ourselves as we only consider collaborations between actors of one type: large groups that are very active in R&D. Our analysis proposes to mobilize the concepts of sectoral innovation system (SIS; see Malerba 2002) and technological innovation system (TIS; see Bergek et al. 2015) in order to interpret the nature of these collaborations.

We then highlight two general phenomena over the 2010–2015 period:

– inventive cooperation relationships mainly occur between partners with complementary technological skills. From this point of view, R&D “coopetition” ...