Scaling of patenting with urban population size: evidence from global metropolitan areas

J. Lobo (), D. Strumsky () and J. Rothwell ()
Additional contact information
J. Lobo: Arizona State University
D. Strumsky: University of North Carolina-Charlotte
J. Rothwell: The Brookings Institution

Scientometrics, 2013, vol. 96, issue 3, No 11, 819-828

Abstract: Abstract Larger agglomerations of individuals create a social environment can sustain a larger repertoire of intellectual capabilities, thereby facilitating the creation and recombination of ideas, and increasing the likelihood that interactions among individuals will occur through which new ideas are generated and shared. Relatedly, cities have long been the privileged setting for invention and innovation. These two phenomena are brought together in the superlinear scaling relationship whereby urban inventive output (measured through patenting) increases more than proportionally with increasing population size. We revisit the relationship between urban population size and patenting using data for a global set of metropolitan areas in the OECD and show, for the first time, that the superlinear scaling between patenting and population size observed for US metropolitan areas holds for urban areas across a variety of urban and economic systems. In fact the scaling relationships established for the US metropolitan system and for the global metropolitan system are remarkably similar.

Keywords: Urban scaling; Patenting; Global metropolitan areas; Superlinearity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-013-0970-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:96:y:2013:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-013-0970-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-013-0970-3

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().