Investor-patent networks as mutualistic networks

Théophile Carniel; Léo Cazenille; Jean-Michel Dalle; José Halloy

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arXiv · 2311.18625

Investor-patent networks as mutualistic networks

Théophile Carniel·Léo Cazenille·Jean-Michel Dalle·José Halloy

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Abstract

Venture capital investments in startups have come to represent an important driver of technological innovation, in parallel to corporate- and government-directed efforts. Part of the future of artificial intelligence, medicine and quantum computing now depends upon a large number of venture investment decisions whose robustness against increasingly frequent crises has therefore become crucial. To shed light on this issue, and by combining large-scale financial, startup and patent datasets, we analyze the interactions between venture capitalists and technologies as an explicit bipartite patent-investor network. Our results reveal that this network is topologically mutualistic because of the prevalence of links between generalist investors, whose portfolios are technologically diversified, and general-purpose technologies, characterized by a broad spectrum of use. As a consequence, the robustness of venture-funded technological innovation against different types of crises is affected by the high nestedness and low modularity, with high connectance, associated with mutualistic networks.

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Théophile Carniel, Léo Cazenille, Jean-Michel Dalle, José Halloy. 2023-11-30. Investor-patent networks as mutualistic networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18625

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