The local innovation system of the oil and gas industry in the North Sea : the application of patent data in the study of innovation systems

The North Sea oil province, one of the world's major centers of petroleum and natural gas production, has been in play for four decades. Production rates have approached their peaks in recent years and are expected to decline continuously in the future. The economies of certain cities and regions bordering on the North Sea have become heavily dependent on the oil and gas industry. How these local economies will sustain themselves in the future as resource depletion continues is a critical question. To gain insight into this question, we selected a matched pair of city-regions, each of which is an important center of the oil and gas industry in the North Sea province: Aberdeen in Scotland and Stavanger in Norway. By studying the similarities and differences between the local innovation systems in the two regions, we can gain a general understanding of how local economies respond to changes in their environment. U.S. patenting data are used as a tool to describe the behavior and performance of the two local innovation systems. The patent data provide a means of systematically and consistently estimating knowledge flows. The use of U.S. patent and patent citation data provides evidence, references, and guidelines to the project from a quantitative perspective. Several indicators were developed to describe these knowledge flows, along with a model providing further insight into how knowledge was acquired and introduced into the two local innovation systems, how and to what extent local innovation capabilities were developed, and how knowledge created locally has spread elsewhere.