It's best for information spread and developing nations.

It is noteworthy that one of the five indicators proposed by Ginarte and Park (1997) to measure the intensity of IP protection in a country is membership in international patent treaties, but they did not empirically analyze and elaborate on the rationality of using this as an evaluation indicator. Can signing and entering into international treaties promote international technical collaboration and spillover? Previous studies have led to the conclusion that IP protection policies have a significant effect on foreign technology spillovers in low- and middle-income countries (Xu and Chiang, 2005). Not only is internal legislation important for patent decisions but international treaties can also further stimulate innovation activities and disseminate innovative knowledge to signatory countries by reducing the uncertainty of inventing firms. Additionally, high-tech companies can gain potential advantages in larger product markets by seeking protection in countries that participate in the protocols (Dekker et al., 2012). Multilateral technology agreements have a positive effect on international technology R&D collaboration. Co-inventions are significantly affected by the membership in implementation agreements, and it is, therefore, necessary to establish effective international mechanisms to solve the common problems in international technical collaborations (Haščič et al., 2012).

Developed countries hope to export IP for benefits, while developing countries want to integrate into the international innovation environment to enhance their innovation capabilities. Thus, both have a strong desire to join IP treaties and cooperate with other countries in innovation. Although previous studies consider whether a country or region is a member of IP treaties as an indicator for assessing the intensity of IP protection, these studies have not empirically tested whether IP treaties can truly affect IP protection and thereby promote international innovation collaboration. Using the IP treaties generally recognized by all countries as a test bed, we explore whether there is a positive effect of IP treaties on innovation collaboration to fill in these gaps. Therefore, we raise the following questions in this article: (1) Does a country joining IP treaties leads to more international cooperation with other countries or regions and enhance its importance in international cooperation activities? (2) Are there differences in the impact of different types of IP treaties on international innovation cooperation between developed and developing countries? We examine a set of IP treaties and innovation collaboration networks in different periods to explore the factors underlying innovation collaboration and then apply regression modeling to test for country and treaty differences in the effect of IP treaties on innovation collaboration.