An Empirical Research On Co-patent Network,Social Capital,and Innovation Output

With the continuous changes in the economies of the world and the steady improvement of the scientific level,more and more enterprises regard patent cooperation as an important means to improve the innovation performance of enterprises.On the one hand,patent cooperation helps reduce corporate R&D costs and control innovation risks.On the other hand,interdisciplinary interactions between collaborators may spur creativity and effectively increase the company’s innovation output.In recent years,more and more scholars have focused on co-patent networks.The research on co-patent networks mainly focuses on the following three aspects:(1)Research on the characteristics and evolution of co-patent networks.(2)Research on the driving factors of the formation and evolution of co-patent networks.(3)Research on the relationship between co-patent network and corporate performance.Most of the existing researches use the co-patent network as the background to explore the impact of the structural capital of enterprises in the co-patent network on innovation output,but less on the relationship capital and cognitive capital of the enterprise in the co-patent network influences.Firstly,based on the theory of social capital,this study puts forward the hypothesis of the influence of structural capital,cognitive capital and relational capital on innovation output in the co-patent network.Secondly,the UCINET 6 software was used to construct the co-patent network in the mobile phone industry from 2003 to 2017,and the structural characteristics and evolution of the co-patent network were analyzed.Finally,the Poisson regression model is used to empirically test the hypothesis proposed in this study.The empirical analysis shows that:(1)There is a significant inverted U-shaped relationship between the centrality of the degree and the innovation output,which means that there is an optimal cooperation scale in patentcooperation.The higher the degree of centrality,the wider the direct link between companies in the cooperative network,but too many direct partnerships will have a negative impact on innovation output.(2)Structural holes have a significant positive impact on innovation output,meaning that companies occupying a “bridge” position in the co-patent network have higher innovation output.(3)There is a significant U-type relationship between the clustering coefficient and the innovation output,which means that in the co-patent network,the moderate degree of aggregation is conducive to improving the innovation output of the enterprise.(4)Cognitive capital has a significant positive impact on innovation output,which means that companies that start patent cooperation earlier in a certain field have deeper insights into their fields and help to improve innovation output.(5)Relational capital has a significant positive impact on innovation output.This result shows that repeated cooperation between enterprises helps to increase trust and promote in-depth communication and learning between the two parties,thereby improving innovation output.Finally,this paper proposes:(1)Enterprises should maintain a moderate scale of cooperation and network agglomeration,occupying more “bridges”in the co-patent network.(2)The number of times that an enterprise should increase the number of repeated cooperation with existing partners.Future research should consider different types of inter-firm partnerships and consider the impact of interactions between different dimensions of social capital on innovation output.