The Internationalization of Inventive Activity: A Gravity Model Using Patent Data

This paper discusses the extent and the determinants of the internationalization of European inventive activity, between 1990 and 2005, using an innovative method to treat the information contained in the European Patent Office's Patstat database. We introduce a new set of indicators measuring internationalized patent applications that are fully coherent with the principle of fractional counting. The observed level of internationalization of inventive activities, while being rather low, has steadily increased over time. The amount of collaboration between actors residing in different countries is assessed by means of a gravity model. The amount of bilateral collaboration is positively affected by the presence of a common language, a common border and by more similar cultural characteristics. International collaboration is negatively affected by distance, with estimated elasticities that are significantly smaller than the ones that characterize international trade.