Globalization, it appears, is here to stay.
That’s the consensus of a wide ranging analysis of the scientific and innovation landscape of the G-20 countries, published by Thomson Reuters in recognition of the recent summit in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The report examines two different sources of data: the number and citations of peer-reviewed scientific research articles, and the number of patents granted in a given country. The United States saw a continued flat-line trend in terms of overall output in both categories, but the increasing volume from some emerging economies has split the pie more evenly. For example, the world share of Chinese scientific papers has increased from 5.6% to 14% over the last decade, while the American proportion has decreased from 33% to 27.8%. Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, while starting with lower absolute numbers of papers and incomplete patent data, have also gained ground.
And despite China’s continued blitz, the much reported cooling of the BRICs is noticeable in research and innovation metrics. Brazil, Russia, and India all saw decreases in their number of published papers; Brazil also produced less than half as many patents in 2012 as in 2011.
Analysts David Pendlebury and Bob Stembridge took the opportunity of the G20 summit to highlight shifting trends in global research and innovation. After all, Stembridge explains, “there is a pretty strong correlation between research activity and economic output.” Research leads to patents, and although the patent review process can stretch up to 7 years, both activities are used over the long term “as proxies for innovation,” according to Stembridge. For context, an R&D investment of 2% of GDP is average for European Union nations; developing countries are typically lower, while South Korea and Israel, which invest up to 4% of GDP, lead the charge. Nonetheless, raw numbers of R&D funding are not sufficient as exclusive measures of technical aptitude or future economic potential. After all, “some funding could be to build facilities, some is to build equipment; not everything translates into output,” says Pendlebury. Math, for example, is a pretty low intensity field,” in terms of overhead costs. Not all research funding is created equal, but downstream effects like papers and patents, the thinking goes, don’t lie.
Pendlebury and Stembridge further subdivided a nation’s patents into those registered by the country itself and those belonging to foreign entities. More than three-quarters of China’s 2012 patents, for example, were granted to resident groups, led by ZTE Corp (a telecom company), Sinopec Petrochemicals (the world’s fifth largest company by revenue), and the University of Zhejiang.
Typically, patent-worthy inventions must be novel, useful, and capable of industrial application, but the process varies by nation. The United Kingdom recently legislated a tax incentive for companies selling products they’ve patented in the country. Such measures suggest that legal frameworks may be just as important as technical ability in bolstering the statistics. (Stembridge notes that between 25%-33% of applications are approved in the US, whereas “China is a younger system, and tends to grant more patents.”) The non-resident patents are indicative of foreign interest in a country’s market, but the report doesn’t reveal which countries may be interested. Connecting that final piece of the puzzle would show how multi-national companies are reading the tea leaves, potentially displaying strategic interests or regional proclivities.
“The clearest thing to come out of the study,” stresses Pendlebury, “is the shrinking in-country share of patents in 2012 despite the rise in overall number of patents. We’re seeing that countries are more connected to each other than ever before.”
