Identifying the Evolution of Patent Assignees Collaboration Networks: A Case of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)

This paper is a fundamental work of a purpose to identify the correlation between patent assignees collaboration networks and technology innovation activities, which includes R&D collaboration and management, technology transfer and transform, etc. The principal task of this paper is to confirm a series of methods used for identifying the evolution pattern of the patent assignees collaboration networks and make a demonstration of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), P.R. China. The analysis was carried out at two levels: ego network, in which CAS was taken as one node, and global network, in which all the subinstitutes of CAS were taken as nodes. Analysis focused on applications numbers, growth of collaborators, densification and growth, network diameter and distribution patterns of final collaboration networks. The results shows that CAS patent applications grew rapidly and showed an exponential growth feature, the collaboration networks tended to densify, the diameters of global networks increased constantly with no signal of being stable, increase or decrease in future. The final global network from 1985-2009 had been mapped and the nodes had degrees k followed a power law distribution. the CAS patent assignees collaborations networks had the growth and preferential attachment features, was consistent to the hypothesis that there might be some factors deciding the evolution patterns of the patent assignees collaboration networks. It is a fundamental work to identify the correlation between patent assignees collaboration networks and technology innovation activities.