Friends and rivals: modelling the social relations of inventors

In this chapter we develop a model where a population of inventors is rival in the production of patents. Inventors are embedded in the social space, and this affects the process of knowledge creation and diffusion. Our main contribution to the existing theoretical literature on social networks and knowledge is to introduce explicitly patents and patents’ citations. This is interesting per se, and it favours a better comparability of results with those of empirical analysis on the same topic. Results from numerical simulations show that our model is able to replicate the empirical negative relationship between patents’ citations and social distance. Furthermore, different social network structures may have an impact on the exact shape of such relationship.