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

INTRODUCTION: 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. METHODS: 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. RESULTS: 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. DISCUSSION: 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.