An increasing number of studies have sprung up in recent years seeking to identify individual inventors from patent data. Different heuristics have been suggested to use their names and other information disclosed in patent documents in order to find out, “who is who,” in patents. This paper...

An inventor's own knowledge is a key input in the innovation process. This knowledge can be built by interacting with and learning from others. This paper uses a new large-scale panel dataset on European inventors matched to their employers and patents. We document key empirical facts on...

How do regions enter new and distant technological fields? Who is triggering this process? This work addresses these compelling research questions by investigating the role of migrant inventors in the process of technological diversification. Immigrant inventors can indeed act as carriers of...

This paper documents the influence of diaspora networks of high-skilled individuals - i.e., inventors - on international technological collaborations. By means of gravity models, it studies the determinants of the internationalization of inventive activity between a group of industrialized...