Stars and Comets: An Exploration of the Patent Universe

Carlo Menon ()

SERC Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: The analysis of patent and citation data has become a popular source of evidence on localizedknowledge spillovers and innovation. Nevertheless, an aspect has been overlooked: the patentdistribution across inventors is extremely skewed, as many inventors register one or a fewpatents, while a small number of inventors register many patents. To our knowledge, theprevious empirical literature has not discussed the different kinds of local innovation fromwhich patents may originate. A first contribution of this paper is therefore to document theissue. A second contribution is to investigate whether patents originating from differentscales of innovation are located in different cities. A third contribution - which constitutes themain scope of the paper - is to test whether the concentration of the activity of star inventorsis beneficial to the local productivity of other kinds of innovation - namely the ones led bymore occasional, and less prolific, inventors.

Keywords: localized knowledge spillovers; patents; innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/sercdp0037.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Stars and comets: an exploration of the patent universe (2011)
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:cep:sercdp:0037

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SERC Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().