Journal of Library and Information Studies (Sep 2004)
An Initial Study of Relationships among the R&D Productivitiesof Patent Inventors in Patent, Academic Achievement and ProfessionalPerformances - An Example of Pixar Animation Studies
Abstract
This research initially explores the relationships among the R&D productivities of patent inventors in patents, academic achievements and professional performances in terms of a patent production aspect. Our research object is the Pixar Company, which had been devoted to 3D animation production for a long time and become one of the key players in the industry. This paper presents a study to discover the technical human resource in the company based on inventor analyses from patent information. Three problems were addressed as follows: (1) Pixar's key inventors and their active periods, (2) the collaboration among these inventors, and (3) their academic achievements and professional performances and then examined their relationships among the patents, academic achievements and professional performances. In the study, we produced a graph to depict the collaboration of patent inventors when they cooperated to develop technologies and applied patents, and finally we integrated the graph with the search results from the ACM database and the IMDB databases to synthesize another graph to demonstrate the relationships among the productivities of key patent inventors in patents, academic achievements and professional performances. The findings show that in the digital content industry the performances of patent producing of technical talents principally come from the accumulation of their academic ability. When they applied the knowledge and the competence to the industry, they not only achieved remarkable success but also gained confirmation from international awards. Finally, the study also approved the potential and the feasibility of applying knowledge and techniques of bibliometrics to industrial analysis. (Article content in Chinese with English abstract)
