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Scaling of patenting with urban population size: evidence from global metropolitan areas

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Abstract

Larger agglomerations of individuals create a social environment can sustain a larger repertoire of intellectual capabilities, thereby facilitating the creation and recombination of ideas, and increasing the likelihood that interactions among individuals will occur through which new ideas are generated and shared. Relatedly, cities have long been the privileged setting for invention and innovation. These two phenomena are brought together in the superlinear scaling relationship whereby urban inventive output (measured through patenting) increases more than proportionally with increasing population size. We revisit the relationship between urban population size and patenting using data for a global set of metropolitan areas in the OECD and show, for the first time, that the superlinear scaling between patenting and population size observed for US metropolitan areas holds for urban areas across a variety of urban and economic systems. In fact the scaling relationships established for the US metropolitan system and for the global metropolitan system are remarkably similar.

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Notes

  1. For a review of the many empirical regularities in economics and finance which can be described as “power laws” see Brock (1999) and Gabaix (2009).

  2. 35 U.S.C., Chapter 10, §§ 101–103.

  3. Roughly 53 percent of applications to the EPO were filed under the PCT (van Zeebroeck and van Pottelsberghe 2011).

  4. For more on the differences got to http://www.bea.gov/regional/docs/econlist.cfm.

  5. We thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this issue to our attention and urging us to address it.

  6. http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=70&step=1&isuri=1&acrdn=2

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    J. Lobo

  2. University of North Carolina-Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, 28223, USA

    D. Strumsky

  3. The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 20036, USA

    J. Rothwell

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  1. J. Lobo
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  2. D. Strumsky
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  3. J. Rothwell
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Correspondence to J. Lobo.

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Lobo, J., Strumsky, D. & Rothwell, J. Scaling of patenting with urban population size: evidence from global metropolitan areas. Scientometrics 96, 819–828 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-0970-3

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