Patent application and technological collaboration in inventive activities: 1980–2005

Patent application encompasses valuable information about inventive activities. This study examines the pattern of international collaboration across countries in inventive activities using the information about inventors and assignees as defined by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). This study first develops a series of indices and then uses the patent information from the USPTO databases on the fields of inventors and assignees to evaluate these indices, with the data from the eight most inventive OECD countries and two Asian economic entities (South Korea and Taiwan) for a span of 1980–2005. The results reveal a pattern of increasing collaboration in inventive activities across the world over the past two decades, which may suggest that the world has begun to embrace the inceptive stage of “Techno-globalism.”