DP RIETI Discussion Paper Series 09-E-022 How "Open " is Innovation in the U.S. and Japan?: Evidence from the RIETI-Georgia Tech inventor survey

While individual inventors are key to technological progress, it is becoming increasingly necessary for inventors and their firms to exploit information and capabilities outside the firm in order to combine one’s own resources with resources from the external environment. To better understand the collaborative process in inventions, we collected detailed information on a sample of triadic patents, focusing on the invention process, sources of ideas, and collaboration (the RIETI-Georgia Tech inventor survey), with over 1900 responses from the US and over 3600 responses from Japan. Our results suggest that in both countries, just over 10 % of inventions involved an external co-inventor and about 30 % involved external (non-co-inventor) collaborators (with the rate of collaboration somewhat higher in Japan). Cross-organizational co-inventions increase as firm size declines, especially in Japan. In both countries, vertical collaborations (both co-inventions and other collaborations) with users and suppliers were the most common. The most important knowledge sources were similar in the two countries: patents, customers, publications, and information from other parts of the firm, although their relative rankings varied somewhat. In particular, patent literature is a relatively more importan