The Rise of International Coinvention

The rapid rise of India and China as innovating nations seems to contradict conventional views of the economic growth and development process. India and China are still at the early stages of development, yet advanced nations are granting rapidly growing numbers of patents to inventors based in these countries. Our analysis of US patents shows that a majority of these patents are granted to local inventor teams working for foreign multinationals. An important fraction of these patents incorporate direct intellectual inputs from researchers outside India or China, a trend that we characterize as "international co-invention." As such, the international patenting surge of India and China does not represent a challenge to traditional models of growth and development, so much as it represents a move toward an expanded international division of labor within global R&D networks. We explore these issues with a focus on multinational R&D in India.