Webinar: Sandro Mendonça, ISCTE Business-School, 06-10-20@11:00GMT

Please join us for a webinar on Tuesday the 6th of October 2020 at 11:00 London time i.e. 12:00 Brussels time, 13:00 Athens time. The speaker is Sandro Mendonça, Dept. of Economics, ISCTE Business School. The title of the talk is "The appropriateness of patent statistics: Their development and diffusion in the wake of the influential work of Zvi Griliches".

The moderator will be Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos. To join us follow this link: https://hello.freeconference.com/conf/call/3011249 . This webinar is free and open to all. To participate and for further information, please contact Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos at least a day prior to the seminar.

Abstract: 30 years on after the publication of Zvi Griliches’s influential survey on “Patent Statistics as Economic Indicators”, the debate on the appropriateness of patent statistics keeps going intense. This paper analyses the citation tree of Griliches’s survey to understand how patent statistics have been used by academics from different fields. How has this scholarly community evolved? To what disciplines do they belong? Where are the main geographical hubs? What influential works cite Griliches’s survey? We address these questions by doing a bibliometric analysis of all articles and reviews that cite Griliches (1990) in WoS, and we combine data-driven and qualitative techniques to study two dimensions of influence: Geographical and Disciplinary. On the former, we find that there is a prolific US cluster, together with an Italian-French cluster and a Dutch- Belgium-German cluster, while an emerging Chinese spot has been developing recently. On the latter, we find five research areas using or discussing patents as economic indicators: 1) Innovation Management; 2) Geography of Innovation; 3) Economic growth; 4) Green Innovation; and 5) Others (e.g. Patentometrics). The vast majority of the research seems to be on issues related to innovation management (e.g. dynamic capabilities, joint ventures, strategic alliances) and economic growth (e.g. productivity growth, competitiveness). However, some issues related to Green Innovation (e.g. renewable energy, eco-innovation) and to the Geography of Innovation (e.g. knowledge flows, technological relatedness) have been rising recently. Until the end of 2019, Griliches (1990) was cited in 394 different WoS journals, an evident testimony of its influence. We find that Research Policy is the most central journal with around 10% of all publications citing Griliches (1990), followed by Scientometrics, Tech. For. and Social Change, Strat. Manag. J. and Technovation. Although the use of patents as economic indicators remains controversial, overall what we find is that they are still an irreplaceable output measure of technological change that keeps being used to track the adjustments towards a knowledge-based economy and to study the response to other major challenges such as green and environmental innovation.