Abstract: The fuel cell industry as a subfield of emerging industry is selected as a research object. Based on the investigation on the formation characteristics of highly cited patents, some policy recommendations are refined for the development of emerging industry in the late-comer country. Empirical results indicate that highly cited patents are the product of mutual cooperation between inventors, and the knowledge sources of highly cited patents are more dependent on scientific literature, meanwhile, the dominant companies which have more patents do not have the ownership of highly cited patent. Furthermore, the development of emerging industry in late-comer country has a window of opportunity but not congenital advantage, the local firms of late-comer country must actively embed in the global R&D network, pay more attention to the basic research, and voluntary participate in global distribution of intellectual property right and standard formulation.

Key words: highly cited patent, emerging industry, patent mining, Logistic regression