Patent collaboration networks in Sweden and Spain during the Second Industrial Revolution

ABSTRACT

This article aims to analyse and compare the patent collaboration networks of Spain and Sweden during the Second Industrial Revolution, a key period for technological and industrial development in several economies and the distinct development paths taken by these two countries. The data used are from two new historical patent datasets for Spain and Sweden for the period 1878–1914. To study the structure of collaboration networks in both countries, we applied social network analysis methods and focused on two specific key network properties: connectivity and openness to external nodes. The results demonstrate that collaboration networks were better connected and more open to foreign influence in Sweden than in Spain. This research opens new paths for further multidisciplinary studies both on the evolution of industrial economies and on innovation networks dynamics.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaboration
• innovation networks
• patents
• social network analysis (SNA)
• Sweden
• Spain
• Second Industrial Revolution

JEL:

• N01
• N73
• O30
• O33
• Z13

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge financial support from the (i) Collaborative Agreement OEPM-FUAM 2016; (ii) R&D project, Scientific Culture, Perception, and Attitudes towards Science and Innovation in the Spanish Business Sector (CSO2014-53293-R); (iii) Jan Wallanders och Tom Hedelius Stiftelse Tore Browaldhs Stiftelse (P2010-0183:1); and (iv) research visits support program of the Comisión Sectorial de Investigación Científica-Universidad de la República (CSIC-UDELAR), Montevideo 2016. We are also grateful for useful comments provided by two anonymous referees and by organizers and attendees to the I Workshop of the Laboratory on Business Scientific Culture Indicators (Madrid, 2017); to the 2017 RIDGE May Forum (Montevideo); to the XII Jornadas de Investigación de Historia Económica de la AUDHE (Montevideo, 2017); to the session E4 of the EBHA 21st Annual Congress (Vienna, 2017); and to the session L9 of the 2018 ESSH Conference (Belfast).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ For recent reviews, see Pippel (2013); Phelps, Heidl, and Wadhwa (2012).

² For instance, between 1870 and 1914, Sweden had approximately four times more patents per million inhabitants (a total average of 273) than Spain (72.5). See Sáiz (1999, 121, Fig. 11).

³ Although the two countries are of roughly the same size (Sweden is 450,295 km² and Spain is 505,990 km²), they have different administrative geographies that do not allow for a more accurate comparison.

⁴ This first export expansion occurred around the turn of the twentieth century in the machinery and equipment industry, where Swedish firms were more active (Schön 2000, chaps. 4 and 5). Export statistics collected by Edvinsson (2005) tell a similar story. From 1870 to 1915, exports almost doubled, from less than 20% to 37% of GDP. These export levels would not be reached again until the mid-1990s, after Sweden’s second export generation that started in the 1960s.

⁵ In fact, between 1880 and 1914, the Spanish GDP per capita was well below the average of the countries of the current European Union (see Carreras and Tafunell 2004, 39–50), and there were no multinational firms.

⁶ The datasets contain in total 59,537 patents registered in Spain and 40,923 registered in Sweden between 1878 and 1914. See Sáiz et al. (2000) and Andersson (2016) for further information on the Spanish and Swedish patent historical databases.

⁷ Only 12% of total nodes in Spain and 7% in Sweden were firms. In the connected components of the networks, the presence of firms is even more limited: 1% of connected nodes in Spain and 2% in Sweden were firms.

⁸ See Lobo and Strumsky (2008) for more details on this indicator.

⁹ There is also empirical evidence reporting negative effects of network connectivity (Lobo and Strumsky 2008) and openness (Crespo, Suire, and Vicente 2016) on innovation outputs. However, what seems to have a negative impact on innovation are the excessive levels of these two network properties; until these levels are reached, network connectivity and openness are associated with good innovation performance (Uzzi and Spiro 2005; Galaso 2018). As we discuss later, the networks of Spain and Sweden in this period were far from presenting excessive levels of connectivity and openness. Therefore, we could expect both network properties to be associated with better innovation results in each country.

¹⁰ For example, similar studies focused on more recent periods report density values ranging from 0.01 to 0.05 (Cantner and Graf 2006; Fleming, King, and Juda 2007; Lobo and Strumsky 2008), while in the historical networks that we analysed, density ranged from 0.000008 to 0.00004.

¹¹ One possible explanation for this evidence is that, unlike co-invention networks, in co-patent networks such as ours, a giant component will never emerge and, therefore, there is no tipping point. However, other previous studies with co-patent networks in recent periods reported large components that agglutinate a significant number of nodes. For example, in Graf and Henning (2009), co-application networks (referred as ‘cooperation networks’ by the authors) have large components with 15% of the nodes. As long as the largest components in our historical networks were always below 0.5% of the nodes, we expect them to increase significantly in size over the following years. In fact, some relatively large components emerged and developed in our networks during the subperiods under study. We expect that these components will be found to connect to each other, increase, and form a giant component after 1914.

¹² Holmström and Egnér made important inventions on stronger microphones for long-distance phone calls. Tillquist owned an electrical engineering firm in Stockholm, and would later help finance the development of Electrolux’s first refrigerator. Tillquist’s firm was later acquired by Swedish AEG-Telefunken in 1968, but later divested and is still active today.