Are Litigated Patents Valuable? Litigated Patent Citation Network Analysis between Companies: A Case Study of the Light-Emitting Diode (LED) Industry

摘要

This study carries out an in-depth analysis of the litigated patent citation network in the LED industry, in terms of the nature of the network and the technical knowledge flow. In this way, this study provides a new idea that the technical knowledge flow in a citation network can be analyzed based on litigated patents. This research consists of three phases, namely data collection and collation, matrix and network establishment, and network analysis. As for the network analysis, it includes visualized analysis, topological structure analysis, and node centrality analysis. The analytical results show that the degree distribution of the citation network follows a power law, which is a feature of scale-free networks. Among the technical knowledge flow for the LED patents, the most important companies include Philips, Cree, Nichia, Osram, Seoul Semiconductor, and GE. The research perspective in this research can be provided for reference of other studies on the technical knowledge flow in other fields.