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Online juin 2016 Indicateurs 2016International audienceIn this paper, we address the determinants of clean energy inventions by 946 large firms. We use a new set of large firms’ patent portfolios and we broaden and deepen existing literature on this issue in two main ways: first, we conduct our study directly at the firm level and not at the industry or national levels and second, we do not focus on a single industry but encompass all industrial sectors. Drawing on firm (internal and external) knowledge and knowledge accumulation, we show there is a robust positive association between the (past) knowledge accumulated capital related to clean technologies and the number of inventions produced in that field, even after controlling for industry and nation fixed effects and other factors. The same relation works for (past) knowledge-accumulated capital in other (non-clean) technologies. However, the relation’s impact on the number of clean inventions produced is much lower. The magnitudes of our coefficient are in line with that obtained previously on firms in the auto-industry or at the sectoral leve

In advanced methods of delineation and mapping of scientific fields, hybrid methods open a promising path to the capitalisation of advantages of approaches based on words and citations. One way to validate the hybrid approaches is to work in cooperation with experts of the fields under scrutiny. We report here an experiment in the field of genomics, where a corpus of documents has been built by a hybrid citation-lexical method, and then clustered into research themes. Experts of the field were associated in the various stages of the process: lexical queries for building the initial set of documents, the seed; citation-based extension aiming at reducing silence; final clustering to identify noise and allow discussion on border areas. The analysis of experts' advices show a high level of validation of the process, which combines a high-precision and low-recall seed, obtained by journal and lexical queries, and a citation-based extension enhancing the recall. This findings on the genomics field suggest that hybrid methods can efficiently retrieve a corpus of relevant literature, even in complex and emerging fields.

The aim of the paper is to track the scale and the strategy of European multinational firms related to the internationalization of their R&D. We address two questions: 1. Can we confirm the general view assuming a growing trend in the internationalisation of technology? 2. Does the “home base augmenting” dominant strategy observed in the 1990s still hold? We use a patent data set for a sample of 349 firms and two time periods 1994-1996 and 2003-2005. We find out: 1) the remaining importance of the national technological bases of MNCs, 2) R&D internationalisation is not continuously growing over the period under observation, 3) an emerging trend working to the detriment of the home base augmenting strategy.