From processing-centered innovation to analytical diversification: network evolution in virgin olive oil patents

This study examines how the technological structure of virgin olive oil (VOO) innovation evolved between 1990 and 2025. It asks whether the sector moved beyond its traditional processing base toward a more diversified innovation system, and whether analytical technologies became important connectors between technological domains.

A patent landscape analysis was conducted on 811 deduplicated simple patent families retrieved from Lens.org. Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) co-classification networks were constructed for three periods (1990-2004, 2005-2014, 2015-2025) and analyzed in terms of network size and density, Louvain community structure, technological-domain shares, and betweenness centrality. Robustness was assessed using Salton/cosine and Jaccard normalization and by excluding the incomplete final year.

The technological knowledge base expanded from 44 CPC subclasses and 72 co-classification ties to 86 subclasses and 328 ties. Modularity fell from 0.499 in 1990-2004 to 0.348 in 2005-2014 and then rose modestly to 0.376 in 2015-2025, a directional pattern reproduced under both normalizations. The analytical subclass G01N rose from 1.8% to 7.2% of CPC tokens and from 3.3% to 14.0% of patent families, and became a top-five bridging class in the recent period, while processing classes (C11B, A23L, A23D) remained the strongest full-period connectors. Within G01N, chromatographic and optical methods predominated.

VOO innovation follows a hybrid pattern of diversification, analytical intensification, and selective re-specialization, rather than a complete transition to a fully integrated bioactive platform. Measurement capability is an increasingly consequential complement to, but not a replacement for, processing competence.