Collaborative Innovation Beyond Science: Exploring New Data and New Methods with Computer Science

Bibliometrics has been a popular tool to study international collaborations in science. Innovation, however, goes far beyond pure science and includes multiple aspects of technological development and commercialization. Evidence on these other aspects of collaborative innovation has been rather limited and rarely systematic. Rapid proliferation of Internet globally has created new opportunities to access and analyze data in a systematic way. This paper showcases novel computational tools and methods and demonstrates how researchers can connect to and analyze data from the Application Programming Interface at GitHub (collaborative programming environment), oDesk and Elance (both largest platforms for freelancers). Data shows how innovators in different countries engage in everyday collaboration. Performance can be measured by the number of repositories, solutions, code commits, followers, and other parameters. Understanding collaborative innovation beyond science has important policy implications, especially in the short- and mid-term since everyday partnerships have immediate effects on innovative products and services.