Exaptation Innovation Indicators for Chinese Listed Firms (2000-2023)

36,597 patent observations document exaptation activities of 711 Chinese listed firms from 2000 to 2023. The dataset integrates patent data, industry classifications, and large-scale textual sources including 61,116 annual reports and 1,127,012 news articles. It provides constructed indicators for analyzing cross-domain innovation.

Use Cases

• Analyze the relationship between technological distance and product distance indicators to model exaptation pathways.
• Use non-anticipation indicators from patent pairs to identify unexpected technological recombinations.
• Correlate exaptation activity trends from patent observations with themes extracted from annual report and news article text.
• Segment exaptation patterns across the 711 listed firms using integrated industry classification information.

Strengths

• 36,597 constructed patent observations provide a substantial basis for analysis.
• Integrates multiple data sources: patent pairs, industry classifications, and over 1.1 million text documents (annual reports and news articles).
• Covers a 24-year time range (2000-2023) for longitudinal study of innovation.
• Includes specific analytical indicators like technological distance and non-anticipation.

Limitations

• Limited to 711 Chinese listed firms, excluding private companies and firms from other countries.
• Indicators are constructed from cited-citing pairs; their accuracy depends on the underlying patent data and linkage logic.
• The 64.9 MB size suggests the dataset is relatively small, potentially limiting deep learning applications.

Provenance

Source

China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) patent data, supplemented by annual reports and news articles.

Collection Method

Constructed from cited-citing patent pairs of listed firms, integrated with textual data.

Time Range

2000 to 2023

Freshness

Data updated to 2023, with a platform last update in March 2026.

Geography

China