International Co-invention

Abstract: The rapid rise of China and India as innovating nations seems to contradict conventional views of the economic growth and development process. In standard models, the acquisition of innovative capacity in frontier technologies emerges as one of the final stages in a long development process. China and India are still poor, yet advanced nations are granting rapidly growing numbers of patents to inventors based in these countries. Our analysis of these patents shows that a majority of them are granted to local inventor teams working for foreign multinationals. An important fraction of these patents also incorporate direct intellectual inputs from researchers outside China or India, a trend that we characterize as "international co-invention. " As such, the international patenting surge of China and India does not represent a challenge to traditional models of growth and development, so much as it represents a move toward an expanded international division of labor within global R&D networks