Employing patent data to measure automobile components suppliers´ knowledge creation

In the auto manufacturing industry, the upstream components suppliers´ knowledge creation not only is important for themselves, but also impacts the downstream manufacturers. Therefore, measure methods to the suppliers´ knowledge creation are pivotal to research in this context. This paper succeeds to traditional measurement that use patent data as proxy, and applies this method to components suppliers of the autos. Three indicators based on patent data have been constructed: patent count (PATENTS), relative citation ratio (RCR), and citation weighted patents (CWP). Our results show that Patents and RCR are both reasonable indicators to measure supplies´ knowledge creation. This finding echoes other researchers who found the similar conclusion within auto makers. Therefore, in auto manufacturing industry, both auto makers and suppliers can use uniform method to measure knowledge creation activities, which lays steady foundation for research on knowledge management within the auto manufacturing supply chain.