Co-Patenting and Network Structure: Their Impact on Firm Performance

To stay abreast of the dynamic market and technological environment, firms should improve their innovation and economic performance continuously. To cope with such requirements, companies often adopt an Open Innovation (OI) strategy. Among several possible OI strategies, co-patenting is a tool to develop innovation with more actors. Thus, companies leverage time by time their innovation network in which each actor represents a node and the knowledge between the companies the link existing between the nodes. The work aims to investigate if and how different innovation networks, foster the innovation and economic performance of firms. An agent-based model and simulator have been developed to investigate the emergence of hubs and the impact on firm performance. The economic and innovation performances are evaluated respectively using turnover and the Innovation Patent Index (IPI). Results show that the presence of hubs in the network helps firms to increase their performance.