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...

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 this paper is to provide new insights into (1) the determinants of the value of inventions and (2) 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...

The aim of this paper is to provide new insights into (1) the determinants of the value of inventions and (2) 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...

This paper aims to investigate the impact of interpersonal networks on the innovativeness of inventors. A significant amount of literature has been devoted to the analysis of network effects in the economic and managerial sciences. The main research works in this field have emphasized the strong...

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...