Inventor collaboration over distance: a comparison of academic and corporate patents

Patenting is often done in collaboration with other inventors to integrate complementary and additional knowledge. The paper takes a spatial view of this issue and analyses the distances between inventors of German patents. We compare the distances between invention teams of German patent applications from 1993–2006 and distinguish between academic and corporate teams and those consisting of researchers from both domains (‘mixed teams’). Due to their different institutional backgrounds different types of proximity guide their spatial search for partners. The basic finding is that regional collaboration clearly prevails. However, the distance between collaborating inventors of corporate patents exceeds that of inventors of academic patents, but the largest distances can be found in science–industry collaborative patents. When excluding directly neighboured collaboration, which is likely to be in-house collaboration, the differences between academic and corporate teams vanish, but mixed teams still overcome longer distances.