The Geography of Innovation Commercialization in the United States During the 1990s (original) (raw)

Regional Innovation in the US over Space and Time

2005

Modeling the spatial aspect of growth has finally become an important subject of economics as exemplified by the increasing popularity of the new economic geography. However, new economic geography models have still not been able to develop a consistent approach to integrate innovation, space and economic growth into a coherent theoretical framework A potential reason for this is that the spatial dimension of knowledge production is still only partly understood in the empirical literature. To shed some additional light on the spatial dimension of innovation we present results of a first-cut analysis building on a recently developed cross sectional-time series data set of US innovation, private and university research and high technology employment. The novelty of this data set is that it opens up the possibilities to incorporate the time dimension into knowledge production function analysis at an appropriate level of spatial aggregation (i.e., US metropolitan areas) that has not been possible in empirical research yet.

Innovation in US metropolitan areas: The role of global connectivity

2015

Managing and leveraging innovation and knowledge generation are key components of value creation by firms in a globally connected world. In this project we analyze innovative activity in the over a 35-year period (1975-2010) to understand the nature and extent of international connectedness of U.S. knowledge networks. Our analysis parses a comprehensive dataset comprising the population of USPTO patents to extract information on inventor co-location. We use this to generate a knowledge map of inventor networks for each of the top 35 Core-Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs), tracking innovative activity and connectedness across geography and over time. We find that in the 1975-90 period, inventor numbers and growth rates tracked overall population numbers, so that the large population centers (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia) accounted for the largest shares. However, in the decades between 1990 and 2010, inventor numbers rose most rapidly in West and South, so that by the end of the period the dominant innovative centers of the country were the Silicon

The increasing importance of geographical proximity in knowledge production: an analysis of US patent citations, 1975 – 1997

Environment and Planning A, 2008

In spite of increasing global flows of ideas, capital, goods and labor, recent research in urban economics and economic geography suggests that geographical proximity between innovators may be important to technological innovation. Many authors also claim that the rise of a knowledge-based economy and changes in the organization of the innovation process have actually increased the value of such proximity to innovation. Yet there is little empirical research on whether this latter proposition is valid. Using patent citation data, this paper investigates changes over time in inventors' dependence on locally-created knowledge. We find an increasing tendency for inventors to cite local patents at three geographical levels: the national, the state and metropolitan levels. This implies that inventors increasingly use domestic knowledge more than foreign knowledge, in-state knowledge more than out-of-state knowledge, and knowledge from the same metropolitan area more than knowledge from outside. Thus, proximity in the creation of economically-useful knowledge appears to be becoming even more important than was previously the case.

The Geographic Concentration of Knowledge: Scale, Agglomeration and Congestion in Innovation Across US States

Social Science Research Network, 2000

Evidence of the importance of agglomeration economies in productivity is reported by a number of studies in regional economics. We extend the literature by looking into agglomeration and congestion in innovation and technological change using an endogenous innovation approach. It turns out that the geographic specificity of knowledge spillovers is also a central concern. Using data from U.S. states, evidence is found that knowledge spillovers are geographically concentrated but agglomeration economies far outweigh congestion effects. These results have important implications for new growth theory as well as regional economics because growth theorists have abandoned the scale implications of their models.

Impact of Employment Agglomeration on Patented Innovation in U.S. Manufacturing Industries from 1986 to 2008

International Journal of Business and Social Research, 2014

This paper examines impact of employment agglomeration in fifteen U.S. manufacturing industries on their innovation activities measured by patent count. A count data model is employed in regressing patent count on employment agglomeration measures, measure of scale, and some control variables. Measures of employment agglomeration and market concentration are found to have negative impacts on innovation in U.S. manufacturing industries. Two agglomeration proxies -Gini index and Ellison-Glaeser index have a negative influence on U.S. patented innovation for the study period. This result implies that the external benefit of spatial agglomeration of similar firms has waned down. The impact of market concentration is also found to be a negative factor for innovation. This result implies that firms with larger plant size are less innovative than those with smaller plant size. Impact of 'share of workers with post graduate degrees' on innovation was found to be a positive but statistically not significant factor for innovation. The 'goods pooling' determinant displayed negative influence on innovation. These results are mostly consistent across fifteen manufacturing subsectors. Rising energy cost is found to be one of the most significant deterrents of innovation whereas, ethnic diversity is found to be a significant facilitator of it. Results of this research lend support in favor of regional economic development policies that promote coagglomeration of various interdependent and complementary industries and small scale industries, and supports ethnic diversity to spur innovation in U.S. manufacturing industries.

Is innovation (increasingly) concentrated in large cities? An international comparison

Research Policy, 2021

We investigate the geographic concentration of patenting in large cities using a sample of 14 developed countries. There is wide dispersion of the share of patented inventions in large metropolitan areas. South Korea and the US are two extreme outliers where patenting is highly concentrated in large cities. We do not find any general trend that there is a geographic concentration of patents for the period 2000-2014. There is also no general trend that inventors in large cities have more patents than in rural areas (scaling). Hence, while agglomeration economies of large cities may offer advantages for innovation activities, the extent of these advantages is not very large. We conclude that popular theories overemphasize the importance of large cities for innovation activities.

Invention in the city: Increasing returns to patenting as a scaling function of metropolitan size

Research Policy, 2007

We investigate the relationship between patenting activity and the population size of metropolitan areas in the United States over the last two decades . We find a clear superlinear effect, whereby new patents are granted disproportionately in larger urban centers, thus showing increasing returns in inventing activity with respect to population size. We characterize this relation quantitatively as a power law with an exponent larger than unity. This phenomenon is commensurate with the presence of larger numbers of inventors in larger metropolitan areas, which we find follows a quantitatively similar superlinear relationship to population, while the productivity of individual inventors stays essentially constant across metropolitan areas. We also find that structural measures of the patent co-authorship network although weakly correlated to increasing rates of patenting, are not enough to explain them. Finally, we show that R&D establishments and employment in other creative professions also follow superlinear scaling relations to metropolitan population size, albeit possibly with different exponents.

Technological regimes and the geography of innovation: a long-run perspective on US inventions

2019

The geographical distribution of innovative activities is an emerging subject, but still poorly understood. While previous efforts highlighted that different technologies exhibit different spatial patterns, in this paper we analyse the geography of innovation in the very long run. Using a US patent dataset geocoded for the years 1836-2010, we observe that ? while it is true that differences in technologies are strong determinant of spatial patterns ? changes within a technology over time is at least as important. In particular, we find that regional entry follows the technology life cycle. Subsequently, innovation becomes less geographical concentrated in the first half of the life cycle, to then re-concentrate in the second half.

Absorptive Capacity, Knowledge Flows, and Innovation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Journal of Regional Science, 2013

High growth and progressive regions possess a culture that promotes innovation. Innovation depends on a region's ability to use its own existing knowledge and knowledge generated elsewhere. This paper demonstrates the importance of the ability to absorb external knowledge in explaining innovation productivity for 106 U.S. metropolitan areas. Using a spatial interaction model of patent citation flows with origin and destination dependence, the destination fixed-effects coefficients provides a measure of a region's absorptive capacity. We identify local conditions that shape a region's absorptive capacity and demonstrate it has a positive and significant impact on innovation productivity. * The authors gratefully acknowledge the comments of the anonymous referees and the journal's co-editor, Steven Brakman, that substantially improved the paper.

Spatial convergence and spillovers in American invention

ANNALS-ASSOCIATION OF …, 2005

Endogenous growth theory places spatial knowledge spillovers at the center of national technological progress. Advances in spatial autocorrelation and regression analyses provide methods to assess the influence of these spillovers on the geographical distribution and growth of invention. This article investigates interstate inequality and convergence in per capita patenting in the United States in the period 1963-2003. We analyze both the complete forty years and trends in ten-year intervals. Moran's I reveals spatial dependence in patenting levels and growth, and LISA cluster maps identify regional groupings of leading and trailing states. Our regression results show that both regional effects and spatial spillovers influence convergence rates, which were low and steady in the thirty years before 1993. In the subsequent decade, patenting expansion concentrated in a few states, inequality increased, and divergence ensued. Western states, in general, and the Pacific Northwest, in particular, increasingly dominate patent growth. Rank order correlation analyses show that convergence before 1993 was driven by catch-up and not by leapfrogging. A final regression analysis shows that patent growth rates in the 1993-2003 interval were higher in more rural states and in those with high proportions of payrolls generated by high-technology manufacturing and producer services industries. States in the South significantly lagged. Our results support the hypothesis that creative skilled professionals seek to reside in states that offer both well-paying jobs in high-technology manufacturing and producer services sectors and easy access to rural outdoor recreation and leisure amenities.