Friends and rivals: modelling the social relations of inventors

In this chapter, we develop a model where a population of inventors are rivals in the production of patents. Inventors are embedded in the social space, and this affects the process of knowledge creation and diffusion. The main element of novelty in our work consists in extending the existing literature in favour of better comparability of our results with those of empirical analysis. This is done by explicitly introducing into the model the counterpart of proxies for knowledge and knowledge diffusion used in these works: in the case of inventors, patents and patent’s citations.