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No 2 2000 vol 4 ISSN 0284-3536 Inforsk, Department of Sociology, Umeå Universitet, SE- 901 87 Umeå, Sweden Tel: +46-90-786 56 98 E-mail: olle.persson@soc.umu.se Swedish US-patents Olle Persson All inventors names are registered in the US-patents along with their country name. Then we can use the USPTO-server and identify all patents with a Swedish inventor. Then if we look at the percentage of those patents co-invented with other countries, US-inventors appear in about 3 percent during the years 1986-1996 (Table 1). This is a much lower figure compared to the percentage of papers co-authored with the US, which suggests that basic research is much more internationalized than technological development. However, we can note a dramatic increase over the years, which leads us to conclude that internationalization is as evident in technology as in basic research. If we study the co-inventions by region we can conclude that North America and EU carry similar weight for Swedish inventors (Table 2). The fact is that collaboration with the US is somewhat stronger. Thus, we cannot up to 1996 find evidence of any marked effect of EU-membership as is the case in basic science. The data downloaded from the USPTO-server contains patents with a Swedish assignee address and patents with Swedish inventor address. Table 3 shows that the national inventor base for Swedish owned patents is still very strong but gradually decreasing. Similarly, of the patents having a Swedish inventor, a growing share is assigned to companies outside Sweden, though in several cases to foreign offices of Swedish multi-national companies. These figures tell just about the same story as the previous ones, but it is of some importance to stress the fact that the national base for technological inventions is still very high. The USPTO-patens has an assignee field which lists names of companies that own the patent. The list of patents with assignees located in Sweden has Ericsson at the very top with 708 issued US-patents during 1986-1997 (Table 4). Then follows ABB, Sandvik, Volvo and Electrolux with much fewer patents than Ericsson. It is interesting to note that Astra and Pharmacia are found on rank six and seven. When comparing with papers there seems to be an inverted rank order in that patenting is more important to Ericsson than papers (194 papers and 708 patents), while Astra that has many papers and few patents (2592 papers and 190 patents). However, we must remember that the coverage of Astra papers is probably much better than for Ericsson, who specializes in telecom engineering which has a much lower coverage in SCI compared to medicine which is the major field of Astra. Still, we can assume that Ericsson and Astra look differently upon patenting and paper publishing. As said earlier, for Astra paper publishing can be a advantageous for technological competition since it may prevent others from patenting. Such as strategy may not be valid or relevant for Ericsson. The Swedish multi-nationals are leading in terms of the number of patents in most of the technological fields as shown in Table 5. This is a reflection of the concentration of R&D-activities to a few companies as shown by the distribution of R&D-costs in the private sector within Sweden. The leader dominance is exceptionally high in Telecommunication (Ericsson) and in Power Generation and Distribution (ABB). If we distribute patents by assignee we find that the classical 80-20 rule applies: 80 percent of the patents are assigned to 20 percent of the companies. In real numbers, 10 companies has 36 percent of the patents, 20 have 47 percent and the 50 most productive companies have 60 percent of the patents. If the skewness of this distribution is good or bad for Sweden is hard to judge. However, for Sweden's innovative capacity it should be of some importance how the highly innovative companies grow and locate their R&D activities.
Table 1. International co-inventions of patents with Swedish inventors by country of collaborator 1986-1996. Note: Percent of Swedish invented patents. Based on USPTO downloads
Table 2. International co-inventions of patents with Swedish inventors by region of collaborator 1986-1996. Note: Percent of Swedish invented patents. Based on USPTO downloads
Table 3. Swedish patents by country address of assignee and inventor 1986-1997 Note: Based on USPTO downloads
Table 4. Swedish US-patents by assignee 1986-1997 Note: Based on USPTO downloads
Table 5. Leading companies by technology field of patents 1986-1997 Note:Technology field defined by all IPC-codes according to the CHI-scheme. Fractional counting of multi-classified patents. Based on USPTO downloads.
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