1. Most OECD countries are contiguous with another OECD country. Traveling abroad isn’t a big deal for scientists in Europe or North America, e.g.: you just need a car. So their travel stats will be higher.
2. If you base international collaboration on co-patentee status, that suggests you are looking at assignees, not inventorship. Any decent IP lawyer will tell you that co-ownership of a patent is a pain in the rear. When I was working in the patent section of Applied Materials, we avoided such situations as a matter of policy. That is not the same thing as co-inventors coming from different companies (which would be a more relevant indicator of collaboration, but is not necessarily evident from the patent). Language in a joint development agreement can (and should) allocate ownership on a different basis than inventorship. As a result, looking for co-patentees will hide instances of co-inventorship.
3. Some of what you’re seeing reflects a difference between, esp. US R&D philosophy and Japanese. At least in the industries I worked in (semiconductors, electronics), US companies trying to develop a new widget would work on several projects in parallel, and see which one would reach the spec first. Some of these projects might be entirely in-house, but the rest would be collaborations.
Japanese style, OTOH, was to try to guess which is the one “best“ technology, gamble on that, fail and then repeat. Because each effort was one-at-a-time, engineering groups with a strong NIH bias (quite common when I was at Sony) were a real choke point for reducing the scope for collaboration. This doesn’t contradict your point, but helps to explain why there are fewer collaborations.
This is not to negate entirely the notion that Japanese academia and industrial R&D can be very insular. But quantitatively your stats might not give a clear picture.
Just a couple of biases overlooked here:
1. Most OECD countries are contiguous with another OECD country. Traveling abroad isn’t a big deal for scientists in Europe or North America, e.g.: you just need a car. So their travel stats will be higher.
2. If you base international collaboration on co-patentee status, that suggests you are looking at assignees, not inventorship. Any decent IP lawyer will tell you that co-ownership of a patent is a pain in the rear. When I was working in the patent section of Applied Materials, we avoided such situations as a matter of policy. That is not the same thing as co-inventors coming from different companies (which would be a more relevant indicator of collaboration, but is not necessarily evident from the patent). Language in a joint development agreement can (and should) allocate ownership on a different basis than inventorship. As a result, looking for co-patentees will hide instances of co-inventorship.
3. Some of what you’re seeing reflects a difference between, esp. US R&D philosophy and Japanese. At least in the industries I worked in (semiconductors, electronics), US companies trying to develop a new widget would work on several projects in parallel, and see which one would reach the spec first. Some of these projects might be entirely in-house, but the rest would be collaborations.
Japanese style, OTOH, was to try to guess which is the one “best“ technology, gamble on that, fail and then repeat. Because each effort was one-at-a-time, engineering groups with a strong NIH bias (quite common when I was at Sony) were a real choke point for reducing the scope for collaboration. This doesn’t contradict your point, but helps to explain why there are fewer collaborations.
This is not to negate entirely the notion that Japanese academia and industrial R&D can be very insular. But quantitatively your stats might not give a clear picture.