The package’s aim is to provide a set of tools for working with patent data that are frequently employed in the context of research related to the Geography of Innovation literature. It will be continously expanded. At this stage, its main function is structural_diversity(), which calculates the measure of structural diversity as defined by Broekel (2019) from patent data. It also features a number of support functions and the function complexity_frontier() used to transform an index of technological complexity to the so-called complexity frontier, which Mewes & Broekel (2022) use to aggregate the technology-specific index to the level of a spatial unit (regions or countries).
The package requires the packages igraph, tidyverse, widyr,future, future.apply and data.table to be installed.
Broekel, T., 2019. Using structural diversity to measure the complexity of technologies. PLoS One 14, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0216856 Mewes, L., Broekel, T., 2022. Technological complexity and economic growth of regions. Res. Policy 51, 104156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2020.104156
You can install the development version of GeoInno from GitHub with:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("tombroekel/GeoInno")This is a basic example:
library(GeoInno)
## Calculate structural diversity using artificial data set pat_df
complexity <- structural_diversity(pat_df)