ABSTRACT
Here we combine the same kind of relational analysis on inventors’ data with the results of a short questionnaire submitted to a subset of Italian academic inventors, and with data on their scientific publication record and CVs. Our objective is to explore in greater depth the personal relationships that academic inventors entertain with co-inventors with a different background and/or professional status. In order to do so, we adapt Gould and Fernandez’s (1989) definitions of brokerage roles to our data, and illustrate some of our results with selected biographical information. In Section 2 we provide a brief summary of the literature on academic inventors, and of the technical literature on the notion of ‘brokerage’ as applied to social network analysis. In Section 3 we describe our data and methodology. In Section 4 we present our quantitative results and biographical examples. Section 5 concludes.
