The authors analyzed patents filed at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from 1990 to 2009, to determine four things: the contribution to global innovation by the prominent, newly industrialized countries, Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC); the degree to which their national innovation systems have been internationalized; the predominant pattern of innovation management in these countries; and whether these patterns and their evolutions converge across the countries.

A patent is scored to one of the countries when all or some of its owners are located in the country or when all or some of its inventors are located there. The intersections of the three subcategories (all, some, none) of the two dimensions form nine patterns, with eight counting for an in-country innovation. The analysis found that the contribution of the BRIC countries increased rapidly during the period, from 1.5 to 3.5 percent. China overtook India in share by 2008, but the levels for both were much higher than for Russia and Brazil. The predominant pattern was foreign ownership with joint domestic-foreign inventors, which can include joint research projects, foreign direct investment in the country, and integration of a local research and development (R&D) subsidiary with foreign headquarters. This result implies that the BRIC global innovations were dominated by foreign multinational companies, although the percentage for patterns with local ownership increased after 2006. The results for each country tended to converge over the period, despite apparent differences in national innovation systems, comprising local firms, academia, government agencies, investment sources, and supportive legislation.

This study has more value for students of information and communications technology (ICT) development for its choice of data and taxonomy (location of owners and inventors) than for its finding. The patent data is less expensive to obtain and arguably no less complete than survey data, given the assumption that owners of knowledge-rich innovations will seek patent protection in principal high-technology markets. However, the study has several major limitations. Its lack of breakout for sector and estimated value of the innovations leaves the researcher wondering how significant the growth was of BRIC share in ICT innovations compared to, say, biotech ones. The end point in 2009 excludes recent years, which have witnessed outward direct foreign investments by Chinese ICT companies, such as Huawei, and reports of aggressive efforts by the Chinese government to put more R&D completely under domestic ownership. Finally, the study fails to recognize that the BRIC (or BRICS, since the addition of South Africa in 2010) has become a self-conscious organization of states and may start to promote a system of innovation among themselves, with the long-term effect of altering the global pattern of innovation from the hub-and-spokes model to a mesh.