The ‘inventor balance’ and the functional specialization in global inventive activities

Lucio Picci and Luca Savorelli

Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 2018, vol. 27, issue 1, 39-61

Abstract: Inventors and organizational assets are inputs of inventive activities which are often provided at a global scale, where countries might specialize in the provision of one or the other type of inputs. We introduce a new patent-based metric, the ‘inventor balance’, to quantify this type of functional specialization, which we discover to be considerable, and we propose a conceptual framework to explain it. We observe a progressive ‘decoupling’ of national sub-systems providing respectively inventors and organizational assets. Moreover, we find that countries with a high level of innovativeness relative to their economic development, high technological specialization, and strong individualistic cultural traits, contribute relatively more inventors than organizations to the global production of inventions.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1080/10438599.2017.1293598

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