Exploring Temporal and Spatial Evolution of the Patent Collaboration Network: A Case Study of Smart Grid Field in China

Smart grids (SGs) have been widely recognized as an effective way to achieve sustainable energy transformation. SG construction plays an important role in environmental protection and promoting world economic and social development. However, Chinese SG field is still in the technology research and development stage, with immature technology, collaborating with leading partners to achieve effective integration for grid operation control technology, flexible transmission, and other equipment seems to be a major challenge. Therefore, the core content of SG is to form a collaborative innovation network to interactively and instantly connect various partners, which will greatly enhance the interactive operations of power grid and improve the overall efficiency of SG. Under such a background, this article attempts to construct a collaborative innovation network for Chinese SG field and investigate dynamic evolution of this network, in order to form a communicating platform that allows collaboration and operations among different partners. Based on the application data of collaborative patents from National Intellectual Property Administration, PRC, this article employs social network analysis method and visualize the temporal and spatial evolution of collaborative innovation network for Chinese SG field. The results show that there is obvious stage characteristic in the temporal evolution process of the network, there are significant differences in the breadth and depth of interregional collaboration concerned with the spatial evolution, meanwhile, the patent collaboration relationships are diverse, and State Grid Corporation of China is always at the core of the network. Finally, combined with China's actual situation, some policy recommendations are raised.