Technological Breakthrough Tendency in Patent Networks Under Open Innovation: Evidence from Autonomous Driving Patents

Firms can gain a competitive advantage through a strategic patent portfolio, wherein patents elucidate technological advancements and establish legal barriers that keep competitors out. However, patents do not provide a perpetual monopoly within the prevailing open innovation paradigm, which means that firms should keep up with innovation input and patent applications to preserve their market dominance. Fostering technological breakthroughs in the patent network thus becomes a critical issue. Anchored in the theoretical views of open innovation, this study conducts an empirical analysis of patent data to examine how patent network structural features influence the technologies’ breakthrough tendency in the field of autonomous driving (AD). The findings indicate that centrality metrics such as degree centrality, harmonic centrality, and betweenness centrality within AD patent networks exert significant influence on technological breakthrough tendency, and the patent family size plays a moderating role in these relationships. Moreover, this research advances theoretical insights for patent strategy formulation in emerging firms of AD, with broader implications for other technology-intensive sectors.