ABSTRACT
How do national factors intersect in network formation in different emerging sectors? Scholars have focused on these regarding networking phenomena: the effects of national and sectoral factors. In spite of their theoretical contributions, attempts have been neglected in identifying and/or linking the factors from both national and sectoral innovation systems within the networks. This paper examines the cross-country differences within a sector, and the cross-sectoral differences within a country, as the consequences of sectoral–national intersections. Longitudinal patent citation networks in two emerging sectors, the hydrogen energy sector and nano-tech sector have been analysed for a time period from 2004 to 2012, in four diverse developed countries. The results convey that the two sectors demonstrate significantly varied networking activities, notably influenced by national capability orientations. On the other hand, cross-country differences in networking activities are also varied by technological path dependence.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for an associate editor Sandro Montresor, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. All errors are mine.
Notes
1 See Choi, Park, and Lee (Citation2011) regarding the hydrogen energy case in Korea.
2 We screened irrelevant patents to prevent unintended results using a minus operator and keywords, including ‘hydrogenation’, ‘hydrogenase’, ‘sulfide’ and ‘peroxide’.
3 Actors who had only one direct tie were not considered in the comparison analysis, as all of them had the maximum efficiency value of one, and they could overestimate the average value of efficiency measurements.