The aim of this paper is to provide new insights into the determinants of the value of inventions and the role that mobility plays in the behavior of prolific inventors, whom we identify based on the number of patents exceeding a threshold of productivity. We examine mobility in two dimensions:...

We provide new insights into the role of individual inventors in innovation. We focus our analysis on prolific inventors in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. We analyse patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to thousands of inventors from those countries between 1975 and 2010 to...

The aim of the paper is to highlight geographical localization of French prolific inventors. We construct a US patents data set for French inventors and use it to show that French prolific inventors are very concentrated within France around Paris and the Rhône-Alpes region. Then we study...

This comprehensive and innovative Handbook applies the tools of the economics of complexity to analyse the causes and effects of technological and structural change. It grafts the intuitions of the economics of complexity into the tradition of analysis based upon the Schumpeterian and...

The objective of this paper is to test two related hypotheses: The first is that the involvement of both prolific and foreign inventors in the production of knowledge has a direct, positive impact on the collective dimension of this knowledge production as measured by the size of the inventive...

We provide a framework for understanding the causes and consequences of the observed shapes of the distributions of individual inventors' productivities. We review a literature that begins with Lotka's (1926) "law" regarding the persistence of variability in scientific productivity at any point...