The hot spot transformation in the research evolution of internationalization of innovation : Based on statistical analysis in scientometrics

Purpose – With the development of economic globalization and the growth of cross-border technology flow, the internationalization of innovation has become an important strategy for enterprises in global competition for both investment optimization and technological advancement. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the research evolution in internationalization of innovation, investigate the hot spot transformation, and predict the future research trends. Design/methodology/approach – The main research approaches in this study are literature co-citation analysis and keyword co-occurrence analysis. Co-citation is applied as a semantic similarity measure for related papers that makes use of citation relationships. Co-occurrence frequency analysis of keywords is also carried out to reveal the hot spots in research of internationalization of innovation. With the data downloaded from Web of Science, Citespace was used as a tool of scientometrics to visualize the node papers, knowledge mapping and keyword co-occurrence ranking in different stages of research evolution. The literature being analyzed in this study come from paper collection by searching the titles, abstracts and keywords, for terms that include “international innovation”, “international R&D”, “international technology”, “globalizational innovation”, “globalizational R&D”, “globalizational technology”, “multinational innovation”, “multinational R&D” and “multinational technology”. Findings – The investigation reveals that there are two distinct stages in research evolution of the internationalization of innovation. The direction of innovation diffusion has turned from “one-way trickle down from developed countries” to “two-way interaction between developed countries and emerging countries”. Meanwhile, the research hotspots have been transformed since 2000 from “detail and operation-focused” to “profound and strategy-focused”. Originality/value – The paper gives an insight into the internationalization of innovation field using literature from the Web of Science as an illustration.