Exploring Tech Company’s characteristic using patent network
Different Tech companies have different company culture, innovation ability, employee’s sense of cooperation, these can be told from company’s propaganda, also, might be better learned from companies’ data, because data never lie.
The officer in U.S. Patent and Trademark office collect some patent data for some large Tech companies, draw them in the network form, finding some interesting company culture inside it.
Below you will see the patent networks for Tesla(electric vehicles), Intrexon(genetic engineering) and Facebook(social network), each node represents an inventor, the size of the node indicates the number of patents that inventor made. The line connecting inventors indicate the collaborations between inventors (they are co-authors of a patent).
I will analyze these networks on two aspects:
1) connect components
2) Strong Triadic Closure
Tesla
In the patent network of Tesla, we can see that there is a huge connected component, means the majority of inventors collaborating on patents. Interestingly, there a several “huge” inventors connected through different patent teams, they might be some technical experts knowing each area well. So Tesla might be such a company that most of the people collaborate on solving problems, and there are some elites participated in many teams.
Intrexon
The patent network of Intrexon shows a totally different pattern compared to Tesla. There are many small connected components inside it, which means tech teams in Intrexon do not collaborate often, or the products are too diverse to work together with. So Intrexon might be a company that many teams inside it, each team focus on one product and there are little collaborate between these teams.
The patent network of Facebook seems to be a hybrid between two companies mentioned above. There is a huge connected component, as well as many individual nodes, these individual nodes indicate that many engineers in Facebook prefer to work alone. Another interesting point is that unlike other two companies, Facebook’s patent network violate triadic closure propriety in many places. There are many isolated leaf nodes in the largest connected component, which means these individuals only participate in one patent, they might just a nominal author for that patent.
Reference:
http://www.periscopic.com/content/exploring-innovation-signatures-in-patent-data/