A framework for assessing innovation collaboration partners and its application to India

We develop a framework for assessing innovation collaboration partners. Based on the evidence from existing empirical studies, we identify four elements relevant as drivers of innovation collaboration. These elements include inventive capacity, technological specialization patterns, openness to international innovation collaboration and economic potential of technology. In order to make the framework operational, we propose a set of patent-based indicators that capture the relevant elements. In a second step, we apply the framework to analyse the attractiveness of India as a partner for innovation collaboration. Except for mapping India’s technological specialization patterns evolution, we show that it is a country very open to international collaboration. Moreover, as a lion’s share of India’s inventions is patented outside of the country, it can be expected that the technology developed in India has supranational commercial potential