Impact Of Collaboration Between Inventors On Knowledge Generation

Inventors formulate collaborative network by exchanging their ideas and sharing knowledge.The inventors' network activates communication among inventors;hence collaboration plays an essential role to generate new knowledge.This study aims at analyzing how the collaboration between inventors influences their research productivity.Based on social capital theory,this study categorizes collaborative network assets of a focal inventor into three types: network positioning;collaborative relation;knowledge resources,and proceeds analyzing the relationship between the three collaborative assets and research productivity.This study targets at 50 listed firms of Korean pharmaceutical industry,collects their financial and patent data from 2000 to 2014,generates a collaborative network and uses GLMM(Generalized Linear Mixed-Effects Model)for statistical analysis.Korean pharmaceutical firms and their inventors successfully enhance their knowledge generation capacity using the collaboration network over last fifteen years: the number of invention patents has increased by 3.4 times;the productivity of individual inventors has doubled.The fact that 98% inventors conduct collaboration for producing patents strongly supports that collaboration is inevitable for creating new knowledge.To be specific,this study firstly focuses on how network position influences research productivity.The network position commonly represents how many collaborators a focal inventor has(Degree Centrality);how many a focal inventor links other inventors(Betweenness Centrality);How fast information sent by a focal inventor disseminates to all the other members(Closeness Centrality).As a result,the more collaborators a focal inventor has,the more successful he or she generates knowledge;the betweenness capacity of a focal inventor to link other inventors is also closely associated to its research productivity;Dissemination speed is negatively associated.The second research topic lies on how research collaboration relation affects research productivity.Repeated collaboration is positively involved since it makes collaborative partnership more reliable and effective.At the same time,relying on few partners shows a negative effect on research productivity.Finally,this study turns to knowledge resource impacts: internal core resources within a firm and outside resource respectively.Both show no significant contribution to the inventor's research productivity.