Exploring technological resilience at the country level with patents

Resilience is critical to stabilise and reduce shocks and create advantages over competitors in environments with dramatic change and unexpected crises. There is no generally agreed-upon definition of technological resilience, and there is not yet a well-developed theory of technological resilience at the country level. The objective of this paper is to contribute to technological resilience research based on patent indicators by analyzing OECD countries’ technological resilience. This paper provides a framework to analyze the quality of selected patent indicators used for estimating technological crisis. More specifically, four sets of patent indicators, i.e. collaboration, knowledge, diversity, and legal protection, are employed to evaluate technological resilience, which is characterised as crisis probability, intensity, and duration. We found that higher technological coverage leads to higher crisis probability, more original technology leads to higher crisis intensity, and interpersonal collaboration enhances the chance of passing a crisis.