Despite being the main thriving force behind economic growth and industrial development, technological innovation remains highly concentrated on a handful of countries. It is therefore of a great interest to know how countries accumulate and develop their innovative capabilities, what kind of obstacles they need to overcome, and whether it is possible to identify opportunities to develop new areas of technological specialization. In this paper we analyze countries' patterns of technological diversification and specialization along the development process. We provide evidence regarding the importance of existing technological capabilities and the relationship among technologies in shaping possible paths of technological development. We show that the likelihood of diversification is higher for those technologies that are related to countries' existing profile of competences. Moreover, we show this effect to be stronger at earlier stages of development. Additionally, we show that countries tend to follow clear patterns of specialization along the development path, by moving towards more complex and valuable technologies.

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Why do some economic activities agglomerate more than others? And, why does the agglomeration of some economic activities continue to increase despite recent developments in communication and transportation technologies? In this paper, we present evidence that complex economic activities concentrate more in large cities. We find this to be true for technologies, scientific publications, industries, and occupations. Using historical patent data, we show that the urban concentration of complex economic activities has been continuously increasing since 1850. These findings suggest that the increasing urban concentration of jobs and innovation might be a consequence of the growing complexity of the economy.

It is clear that technology is a key driver of economic growth. Much less clear is where new technologies are produced and how the geography of U.S. invention has changed over the last two hundred years. Patent data report the geography, history, and technological characteristics of invention. However, those data have only recently become available in digital form and at the present time there exists no comprehensive dataset on the geography of knowledge production in the United States prior to 1975. The database presented in this paper unveils the geography of historical patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from 1836 to 1975. This historical dataset, HistPat, is constructed using digitalized records of original patent documents that are publicly available. We describe a methodological procedure that allows recovery of geographical information on patents from the digital records. HistPat can be used in different disciplines ranging from geography, economics, history, network science, and science and technology studies. Additionally, it is easily merged with post-1975 USPTO digital patent data to extend it until today.

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More than 30 million people migrated to the USA between late-ninetieth and early-twentieth century, and thousands became inventors. Drawing on a novel dataset of immigrant inventors in the USA, we assess the city-level impact of immigrants’ patenting and their contribution to the technological specialization of the receiving US regions between 1870 and 1940. Our results show that native inventors benefited from the inventive activity of immigrants. In addition, we show that the knowledge transferred by immigrants gave rise to new and previously not exiting technological fields in the US regions where immigrants moved to.

We characterize the knowledge production process whereby the inventive capabilities of the firm generate innovation output in highly inventive multinational enterprises (MNEs). We explore the sensitivity of this relationship to the strength of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection across the MNEs R&D subsidiaries. We argue that MNE innovative performance will be enhanced when the firm’s R&D activities are based in locations where IPR protection is stronger. Moreover, when considering the internal geography of the MNEs R&D activities, innovation performance depends on the distance between the home- and host-country IPR regime. Thus, innovation performance is worse, as the difference between home and host IPR regimes increases. Finally, we explore asymmetries in this relationship, in particular that the deterioration is more marked when MNEs locate their R&D activities in host economies with IPR protection significantly less strict than in their home country. We test these ideas using a unique new dataset about the most innovative MNEs in the world, an unbalanced panel of around 900 MNEs observed for the period 2004 to 2013 and find strong support for all our hypotheses.

This article develops a three-dimension indicator to capture the main features of General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) in patent data. Technologies are evaluated based on their scope for improvement and elaboration, the variety of products and processes that use them, and their complementarity with existing and new technologies. Technologies' scope for improvement is measured using patenting growth rates.The range of its uses is mapped by implementing a text-mining algorithm that traces technology-specific vocabulary in the universe of all available patent documents. Finally, complementarity with other technologies is measured using the co-occurrence of technological claims in patents. These indicators are discussed and evaluated using