DAT The Rise of International Co-Invention: A New Phase in the Globalization of R&D

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The geography of innovation is shifting, and emerging economies in areas like China, India, and Eastern Europe are poised to play an increasingly important role in the global innovation system. While this shift is currently at an early stage, its reality is increasingly accepted by economists, corporate R&D managers, and policymakers. The shift has raised profound scientific questions as well as significant policy concerns. Standard theories view the emergence of innovative capacity in frontier technologies as one of the final stages in a development process that usually stretches over decades. China and, especially, India are still in the early stages of this conventional development process, yet they are already hosting R&D centers sponsored by the world?s technologically elite firms. Is the conventional understanding now obsolete? Tracking patents granted by the patent agencies of the United States and Europe to inventors based in emerging economies provides a useful way of measuring the shift in R&D to these regions. Investigation of these patents highlights the importance of a phenomenon that may partially explain this shift. A large and growing fraction of these patents result from international coinvention ? that is, teams of researchers based in different countries combining their skills and knowledge to generate patented inventions. Analysis of coinvented patents suggests the R&D process can increasingly be disaggregated into multiple stages, which are then each located where they can be undertaken at lowest cost. This project combines quantitative and qualitative techniques to assess the degree to which an international division of R&D labor is emerging, from which both developing and developed nations can benefit. The project also measures the degree to which international coinvention has driven growth in the quantity and quality of research activity in emerging regions. Broader Impacts: Implications for U.S. Technological Leadership. The shift in the geography of innovation will have significant implications for the United States, an economy whose prosperity is largely built on its technological dynamism. Is American technological leadership threatened by these developments? What are the appropriate policy responses? Exploration of the role of international coinvention sheds useful light on these issues. Because growth in invention in emerging economies has been heavily reliant on research inputs from Western firms, it poses less of a direct threat to the economic welfare of advanced industrial countries than has been supposed. In fact, by improving the efficiency of the R&D process and allowing firms to explore more technological opportunities with a given level of expenditure, international coinvention can generate net positive effects on U.S. economic growth and end up reinforcing American technological leadership rather than undermining it. The insights associated with the investigation of the coinvention phenomenon and its impacts will also help research managers consider and leverage this approach towards improving their R&D productivity, and economic impact.