  We have investigated community structure in the co-inventor network of a
given cohort of patents and related this structure to the dynamics of how these
patents acquire their first citation. A statistically significant difference in
the time lag until first citation is linked to whether or not this citation
comes from a patent whose listed inventors share membership in the same
communities as the inventors of the cited patent. Although the
inventor-community structures identified by different community-detection
algorithms differ in several aspects, including the community-size
distribution, the magnitude of the difference in time to first citation is
robustly exhibited. Our work is able to quantify the expected acceleration of
knowledge flow within inventor communities and thereby further establishes the
utility of network-analysis tools for studying innovation dynamics.
