Temporal Motifs in Patent Opposition and Collaboration Networks

TL;DR

This paper models patent opposition and collaboration networks as a temporal two-layer network, using motifs to analyze their structure and interplay, revealing patterns of adversarial and collaborative behaviors among companies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel temporal motif analysis of patent opposition and collaboration networks, highlighting the dynamic interplay and strategic behaviors of companies.

Findings

Large companies often oppose multiple firms.

Companies with adversarial relations are more likely to collaborate later.

Opposition and collaboration patterns are influenced by company size.

Abstract

Patents are intellectual properties that reflect innovative activities of companies and organizations. The literature is rich with the studies that analyze the citations among the patents and the collaboration relations among companies that own the patents. However, the adversarial relations between the patent owners are not as well investigated. One proxy to model such relations is the patent opposition, which is a legal activity in which a company challenges the validity of a patent. Characterizing the patent oppositions, collaborations, and the interplay between them can help better understand the companies' business strategies. Temporality matters in this context as the order and frequency of oppositions and collaborations characterize their interplay. In this study, we construct a two-layer temporal network to model the patent oppositions and collaborations among the companies. We utilize temporal motifs to analyze the oppositions and collaborations from structural and temporal perspectives. We first characterize the frequent motifs in patent oppositions and investigate how often the companies of different sizes attack other companies. We show that large companies tend to engage in opposition with multiple companies. Then we analyze the temporal interplay between collaborations and oppositions. We find that two adversarial companies are more likely to collaborate in the future than two collaborating companies oppose each other in the future.