Network-Mediated Knowledge Spillovers in ICT/Information Security

A large literature has used patent data to measure knowledge spillovers across inventions but few papers have explicitly measured the impact of the collaboration networks formed by inventors on the quality of invention. This paper develops a method to measure the impact of collaboration networks of inventors on invention quality. We apply this methodology to the information and communication technology (ICT) and information security sectors in Israel and find that the quality of Israeli inventions are systematically linked to the structure of the collaborative network in these sectors. We are very grateful to the editor Lukasz Grzybowski and an anonymous referee for very helpful comments and suggestions that significantly improved the paper. We thank the Maurice Falk Institute for Economic Research in Israel, Start-Up Nation Central, the U. S. National Science Foundation (SciSIP grants 1360165 and 1360170), and Portugal's Foundation for Science and Technology for financial support of this research. Lee Branstetter's work on this project was supported by the National Science Foundation and we thank Britta Glennon for excellent research assistance. We are also grateful to Tim Bresnahan, Eugene Kandel, Imke Reimers, and seminar/conference participants at the 19th CEPR IO conference, the 10th Paris conference on Digital Economics, Collegio Carlo Alberto, Hebrew University, Stanford University, Tel Aviv University, ad UC-Berkeley and for helpful comments and suggestions. 2020 by Neil Gandal, Nadav Kunievsky, and Lee Branstetter. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including the notice, is given to the source.