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Firms may suffer differently from the patent thickets in a particular technology field. This paper explores how patent thickets affect the financial performance of firms with different patent propensities and technological leadership.

From the perspective of patent strategy, the authors study how patent propensity, the possibility that a firm applies for patents, affects the patent thickets and financial performance. Additionally, this paper uses patent stock to measure technological leadership, the degree to which a firm can develop, maintain and enhance technology and product innovation, to study the impact of patent propensity on firms. A three-way interaction model is used to explore the relationship among patent thickets, patent propensity, technological leadership and financial performance based on an unbalanced panel of 69 Chinese telecommunication equipment firms from 2008 to 2019.

The authors find that patent propensity positively moderates patent thickets and financial performance. Notably, technological leadership negatively moderates the moderating effect of patent propensity.

This paper enriches the heterogeneous literature of patent thickets and financial performance. It sheds light on the fact that firms with different technological leadership may use different patent strategies to cut through patent thickets.

Defining and validating a map of related technologies is critical for managers, investors and inventors. Because of the increase in the applications of and demand for semiconductor lasers, analyzing the technological position of developers has become increasingly critical. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to adopt the technological position analysis to identify mainstream technologies and developments relevant to semiconductor lasers.

Correspondence analysis and k-means cluster analysis, which are data mining techniques, are used to reveal strategic groups of major competitors in the semiconductor laser market according to their Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) patent applications.

The results of this study reveal that PCT patent applications are generally obtained for masers, optical elements, semiconductor devices and methods for measuring and that technology developers have varying technological positions.

Through position analysis, this study identifies the technological focuses of different manufacturers to obtain information that can guide the allocation of research and development resources.

The economic crisis of 2008 resulted in a unique context for the empirical experimentation of organizational learning and entrepreneurship theories from Schumpeterian inspiration. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the economic downturns change the limits and possibilities to pursue both exploration and exploitation and thus achieve innovative performance.

This study examines an original database with the patent portfolio of 2,309 firms based in Brazil, covering a period of eight years preceding the 2008 economic crisis, that is 2000–2007, and five years thereafter, 2008–2013. To test the hypotheses empirically, the authors use the negative binomial model.

The findings add to the literature in two ways. First, this study found a positive association between exploitation and exploration behaviour and innovative performance. However, this relation is curvilinear because there are diminishing negative effects on innovation. Second, regarding the distinction between creative destruction and creative accumulation, the results support the prevalence of creative accumulation, although consistent with the notion of co-occurrence of both models.

This study expands the discussion on how entrepreneurs respond to the economic crisis in specific contexts of an emerging economy. We provide new empirical evidence through the exploration of a unique data set on the patent portfolio of 2,309 firms based in Brazil. Most of the previous literature has applied this topic to developed countries, and there are few studies that apply this topic outside the focus of US and European countries.

This study aims to examine how the knowledge breadth and depth of a patent affect its likelihood of being pledged. It also seeks to explore whether these relationships change diversely in different technological environments.

A complementary log-log model with random effects was conducted to test the hypotheses using a unique data set consisting of 348,927 invention patents granted by the China National Intellectual Property Administration from 1985 to 2015 belonging to 74,996 firms.

The findings reveal that both knowledge breadth and depth of a patent positively affect its likelihood of being pledged. Furthermore, the knowledge breadth and depth entail different degrees of superiority in different technological environments.

This study focuses on the effect of an individual patent’s knowledge base on its likelihood of being selected as collateral. It does not consider the influence of the overall knowledge characteristics of the selected patent portfolio.

Managers need to pay attention to patents’ knowledge characteristics and the changes in technological environments to select the most suitable patents as collateral and thus improve the success rate of pledge financing.

This study explores the impact of multidimensional characteristics of knowledge base on patent pledge financing within a systematic theoretical framework and incorporates technological environments into this framework.

This study aims to identify and prioritize the key practices and strategies for effective global sourcing and supply chain management (SCM).

The study uses a combination of Pareto analysis and multi-objective optimization based on ratio analysis research methodology to analyze and establish the relationships among the identified key practices and strategies. Pareto analysis enables organization to prioritize organizational efforts and resources by focusing on the most critical factors.

The study shows that the “eco-friendly sourcing strategy”, “lean manufacturing” and “tool cost analysis” are the top critical practices and strategy variables for global sourcing and SCM, whereas the “risk management”, “procurement strategy” and “leverage digital solutions” are the critical practices and strategy variables.

The findings of this research can also assist organizations in making informed decisions to optimize their global sourcing and supply chain operations.

By using these methods, this research paper gives valuable insights into the critical practices and strategies that can enhance efficiency, mitigate risks and drive success in global sourcing and SCM. The subjects and elements this study identified will serve as a framework and suggestions for further theoretical investigation and real-world implementations.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic review of literature on corporate engagement with start-ups (CEWS) by identifying the modes, contexts, antecedents, barriers and outcomes. As an emerging field, CEWS presently has no such review available which will help in building consensus within the field and shape future research directions.

The study followed a two-phased systematic review of literature. Three research databases (i.e. Web of Science, ScienceDirect and SCOPUS) were accessed to gather and conduct the review. Of the total 379 papers retrieved, 63 total relevant papers were studied and analysed. The exhaustive review of literature helped to uncover the contexts, perspectives, antecedents, outcomes and barriers reported across the different modes of CEWS.

The study highlighted the five prominent modes of CEWS favoured by large corporations and start-ups. It found that the large corporations and start-ups associate with one another on the basis of complementarities of activities, resources and motives to pursue their strategic orientations. The engagements also face barriers on the ground, such as incompatibility of goals, power imbalances, cultural differences and weak engagement plans. Most important contexts seen were the high-technology industries in the developed economies like the USA and Europe. It also found that ecosystem creation, accessing innovation and corporate strategy have been preferred as the most productive modes of CEWS in the literature.

This review provides practitioners with a detailed list of the modes and drivers of CEWS. Subsequently, the barriers that need to be managed to successfully execute a specific mode of engagement. This shall enable the practitioners in developing and adopting the best practices while engaging with the start-ups to better facilitate the outcomes of CEWS.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no systematic literature review available in the domain of CEWS – thus, this study makes an important methodological contribution to the field. By consolidating the fragmented yet growing knowledge on CEWS, the study presents a detailed understanding of what drives and obstructs the engagement between large corporations and start-ups.

In recent years patents have become a very popular data source for forecasting technological changes. However, since a vast amount of patents are “worthless” (Moore, 2005), there is a need to identify the promising ones. For this purpose, previous approaches have mainly used bibliographic data, thus neglecting the benefits of textual data, such as instant accessibility at patent disclosure. To leverage these benefits, this study aims to develop an approach that uses textual patent data for predicting promising patents.

For the identification of promising patents, the authors propose a novel approach which combines link prediction with textual patent data. Thereby the authors are able to predict the emergence of hitherto unmentioned bigrams. By mapping these future bigrams to recent patents, the authors are able to distinguish between promising and nonpromising patents. To validate this approach, the authors apply the methodology to the case example of camera technology.

The authors identify stochastic gradient descent as a suitable algorithm with both a receiver operating characteristic area under curve score and a positive predictive value of 78%, which outperforms chance by a factor of two. In addition, the authors present promising camera patents for diverse application fields, such as cameras for surgical systems, cameras for rearview vision systems in vehicles or light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation detection and ranging cameras for three-dimensional imaging.

This study contributes in at least three directions to scholarship. First, the authors introduce a novel approach by combining link prediction with textual patent analysis and, in this way, leverage the benefits of both worlds. Second, the authors add to all theories that regard novel technologies as a recombination of existing technologies in presenting word combinations from textual data as a suitable instrument for revealing recombination in patents. And third, the approach can be used by scholars as a complementary or even integrative tool with conventional forecasting methods like the Delphi technique or Scenario planning.

At least three practical implications arise from the study. First, incumbent firms of a technology branch can use this approach as an early-warning system to identify technological change and to identify opportunities related to their company’s technological competence and provide inspiration for new ideas. Second, companies seeking to tap into new markets may also be interested in the approach as managers could anticipate whether their company’s technological competences are in line with upcoming trends. Third, the approach may be used as a supportive tool for various purposes, such as investment decisions or technology life cycle analysis.

The approach introduces textual patent data as suitable means for forecasting activities. As the statistical validation reveals, the promising patents identified by the approach are cited significantly more often than patents with less promising prospects.

The textile sector is one of the sectors where competition is intense and requires the production of high-value-added products. This study aims to conduct patent analysis to find the technology status, recent trends, applications and technological evaluations of protective textile technologies in practice.

More than 36,840 patent documents related to protective textile technologies are available for researchers, patent examiners and patent researchers. Patent analysis is conducted to report the technology status, recent trends and applications of protective textile technologies. This analysis provides insights into the possible future directions of protective textile technologies in practice. Additionally, association rule mining (ARM) is performed to find the hidden patterns among protective textile technologies.

The development of protective textile technologies is revealed by the technology evaluation in this study. In addition, the sub-technology classes affecting protective textile technologies are examined using the cooperative patent classification (CPC) codes of the patent documents. Technology status and recent trends of protective textile technologies are provided in detail. The results of this study show that (1) protective textile technologies are constantly being developed, (2) the working areas of medical protective textiles are increasing, (3) there are frequent studies on fabric structures for saving lives within the framework of human needs and (4) there are four technology classes, namely A41D, Y10T, B32B and A62B impacting the other technology classes related to textile technologies such as D10B, Y10T, F41H, A62D, D04H, Y10S and D10B.

To have a competitive advantage in the marketplace, evaluation of textile technologies is critical in developing “functionalized” and “technologized” textile products. In particular, evaluating technologies in developing protective textile products is extremely important to meet customer demands and present competitive products in the market. Examining these patents for technology developers, decision-makers and policymakers is an urgent and necessary job. However, studies examining the development of protective textile technologies with patent analysis are very limited in the literature. To fill this gap, technology status, recent trends and applications of protective textile technologies are reported based on patent analysis and ARM in this study.

This study aims to propose a combined effect framework to explore the relationship between research and development (R&D) team networks, knowledge diversity and breakthrough technological innovation. In contrast to conventional linear net effects, the article explores three possible types of team configuration within enterprises and their breakthrough innovation-driving mechanisms based on machine learning methods.

Based on the patent application data of 2,337 Chinese companies in the biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry to construct the R&D team network, the study uses the K-Means method to explore the configuration types of R&D teams with the principle of greatest intergroup differences. Further, a decision tree model (DT) is utilized to excavate the conditional combined relationships between diverse team network configuration factors, knowledge diversity and breakthrough innovation. The network driving mechanism of corporate breakthrough innovation is analyzed from the perspective of team configurations.

It has been discerned that in the biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry, there exist three main types of enterprise R&D team configurations: tight collaboration, knowledge expansion and scale orientation, which reflect the three resource investment preferences of enterprises in technological innovation, network relationships, knowledge resources and human capital. The results highlight both the crowding-out effects and complementary effects between knowledge diversity and team network characteristics in tight collaborative teams. Low knowledge diversity and high team structure holes (SHs) are found to be the optimal team configuration conditions for breakthrough innovation in knowledge-expanding and scale-oriented teams.

Previous studies have mainly focused on the relationship between the external collaboration network and corporate innovation. Moreover, traditional regression methods mainly describe the linear net effects between variables, neglecting that technological breakthroughs are a comprehensive concept that requires the combined action of multiple factors. To address the gap, this article proposes a combination effect framework between R&D teams and enterprise breakthrough innovation, further improving social network theory and expanding the applicability of data mining methods in the field of innovation management.

This paper aims to map the evolution of hydrogen-based technologies (HBTs) by examining the patenting activity associated to these technlogies from 1930 to 2020. In doing so, the study provides a novel perspective on the development of HBTs and offers implications for managers and policymakers.

We collected patent data at the level of patent families (PFs). Our sample includes 317,089 PFs related to hydrogen production and 62,496 PFs to hydrogen storage. We examined PF data to delineate the state of the art and major technical advancements of HBTs.

Our analysis provides evidence of an increasing patenting activity in the area of HBTs, hence suggesting relatively high levels of expectations on the economic potential of these technologies. US and Japan hold the largest proportion of PFs related to HBTs (about 60%), while European applicants hold the highest proportion of highly cited PFs (about 60%). While firms represent the applicant with the highest share of PFs, our analysis reveals that firms holding HBT PFs are primarily from the chemical sector.

While our analysis is limited to examining patent data which capture some aspects of the innovation activity around HBTs (namelly, patented inventions), our study enriches existing literature by performinng a patent analysis on a much larger sample of data when compared to previous studies.

Two main implications emerge from our study. Firstly, there seems to be an urgent need to support the emergence of a dominant design so as to facilitate the consolidation and diffusion of the HBTs, hence the transition to a more sustainable energy production. Secondly, the majority of HBT PFs are held by a small number of countries. This, in turn, suggests opportunities to develop cross-country cooperation (e.g. international agreements, research and technology offices) to support the development and adoption of HBTs globally.

Considering the results obtained in this study, from a social point of view, the attention that organizations have paid to hydrogen related technologies is evident. This suggests that the development HBTs can function as a social enabler for a sustianable energy transition.

Extant research has focused on the individual components of the hydrogen chain. As a result, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the progress made in the area of HBTs. To address this gap, this study examined HBTs by focusing on both production and storage technologies since their initial developments, hence adopting an observation period of about 70 years.