Roles and Positions of Knowledge Flow of Companies in the Silicone Hydrogel Contact Lens Industry

Silicone hydrogel contact lens manufacturers do not only invest in research and development but also absorb the technical knowledge of their competitors. It is an important issue to recognize the position and role on the technological network. This study first combines the in-degree centrality, out-degree centrality, and eigenvector centrality of the patent search network into two variables of activeness and passiveness by principal component analysis. The authors then decide on cluster counts and classify all companies into these clusters by a twostage analysis. The first stage contains variance ratio criteria and 1-way MANOVA to decide on three clusters and the second-stage groups by Activeness and Passiveness as cluster variables of Kmeans clustering and tests significance of these three positions by MANOVA. This study finds out that the roles of these three positions are knowledge absorber, knowledge producer and knowledge inertia.