To address our research objective, we selected an analysis of patent families (hereafter, simply “patents”). Patent data are suggested in TIS literature as one measure for knowledge development and diffusion (Bergek et al., 2008; Hekkert et al., 2007), and have been widely used as a measure of inventive activity and knowledge flows (e.g., Griliches, 1998; Jaffe and de Rassenfosse, 2016;Jaffe, 1989).