Prolific Inventor Productivity and Mobility: A Western/Asian com-parison. Evidence from US Patent Data for 12 Countries

• Authors: Christian Le Bas , William Latham , Dmitry Volodin
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper provides new insights into the role of individual inventors inthe innovation process. Individuals are central in this creative process becauseinnovation is not simply a product of firms and organizations; it requiresindividual creativity (Rothaermel and Hess, 2007). We focus our analysis on prolific inventors (a rich sub category of inventors) because they contribute sohugely to national invention totals (Le Bas et al., 2010) and tend to produceinventions that have more economic value (Gambardella et al., 2005; Gay et al.,2008). Converging empirical evidence has established the significance ofprolific inventors (Ernst et al., 2000). Previous studies of prolific (or “key”)inventors have focused more on the firms in which they work or on the industriesin which the firms operate. Narin and Breitzman’s (1995) seminal work on thetopic is based on an analysis of only four firms in a single sector and a recentpaper by Pilkington et al. (2009) uses only two firms. In contrast to these studieson small samples, we use a very large data set which includes thousands ofinventors in thousands of firms from several countries.

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Comparative Economic Research. Central and Eastern Europe
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 117-132

Dates

published

2012-12-01

online

2013-03-08

Contributors

author

Christian Le Bas

• Ph.D., Full Professor at the University of Lyon 2, France

author

William Latham

• Ph.D., Full Professor at the University of Delaware, USA

author

Dmitry Volodin

• Ph.D., Full Professor, HDR Inc., Silver Spring, MD, USA

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10103-012-0030-x