Congratulations to Dr. Higham for his new position!
© 2019 EPFL
Kyle Higham, currently a postdoc working at the Chair of Innovation and IP Policy with Professor Gaétan de Rassenfosse, has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship starting in 2020 at the Institute of Innovation Research based at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Japan.
Kyle will be continuing his highly transdisciplinary research, embarking on a novel exploration of knowledge flow and technological evolution through the lens of patent citation networks. New patents often cite older patents when the latter are judged to be technologically and legally relevant in some way, and these citations can provide a paper trail of technological progress. Patents and their citations can be naturally represented as a network, where patents are nodes and citations the links between them. However, the analysis of these patent citation networks is typically restricted to data provided by a single patent-granting authority. Linking data from different patent offices, we can ‘stack’ these networks, and a broader view of technological relationships may be captured and analysed with novel mathematical and computational tools. Developing first an understanding of the legal differences in patent citation practice across the globe, this international view of patent citations may teach us much about the nature of invention at all scales by painting a more complete picture of inventive activity than any single office can provide.