An Initial Study of Relationships among the R&D Productivities of Patent Inventors in Patent, Academic Achievement and Professional Performances - An Example of Pixar Animation Studies

專利資訊是公司研發能力的具體表現，嚴謹且具公信力，專利資訊的統計分析結果極適合作為觀察企業技術動向及制定經營策略時的參考。本研究從專利產出的角度，來分析企業的主要研發人才，並檢驗專利之主要研發人才在學術上及專業成就上的表現是否具有關連性。研究對象選擇長期致力於3D動畫技術研發的美國皮克斯（Pixar）製作公司，利用專利分析方法中的各種發明人分析技術，探討以下的問題：（1）Pixar公司技術人才中的主要發明人與他們的活躍期間；（2）主要發明人的合作情形；（3）主要發明人在學術與專業上的成就；及其（4）在專利、學術及專業表現上的關連性。本研究利用腦力圖技術的概念，產生出二個關連圖表：「專利研發陣容脈絡圖」及「專利發明人之專利、學術與專業表現觀系脈絡圖」，後圖是針對「專利研發陣容脈絡圖」產生出之主要發明人，於ACM學術論文資料庫及IMDB電影資料庫中搜尋其表現，最後統合所有資料形成，以針對主要發明人在專利、學術及專業表現進行全面性的檢視。研究結果發現數位內容技術的人才在專利產出的表現，奠基於學術的累積，而將這些知識與技術應用至產業上不僅獲得極大的成功，而且意多有獲得國際獎項的肯定，而本研究也驗證了將資訊計量學應用到產業分析將具有極大的潛力與可行性。Patent information is seen to be a kind of information with the features of exactitude and trustfulness, and it can be used as an indicator to measure the capability of research and development in a company. This research initially explores the relationships among the R&D productivities of patent inventors in patents, academic achievements and professional performances in terms of a patent production aspect. Our research object is the Pixar Company, which had been devoted to 3D animation production for a long time and become one of the key players in the industry. This paper presents a study to discover the technical human resource in the company based on inventor analyses from patent information. Three problems were addressed as follows: (1) Pixar’s key inventors and their active periods, (2) the collaboration among these inventors, and (3) their academic achievements and professional performances and then examined their relationships among the patents, academic achievements and professional performances. In the study, we produced a graph to depict the collaboration of patent inventors when they cooperated to develop technologies and applied patents, and finally we integrated the graph with the search results from the ACM database and the IMDB databases to synthesize another graph to demonstrate the relationships among the productivities of key patent inventors in patents, academic achievements and professional performances. The findings show that in the digital content industry the performances of patent producing of technical talents principally come from the accumulation of their academic ability. When they applied the knowledge and the competence to the industry, they not only achieved remarkable success but also gained confirmation from international awards. Finally, the study also approved the potential and the feasibility of applying knowledge and techniques of bibliometrics to industrial analysis