Innovation in US metropolitan areas: the role of global connectivity

Managing and leveraging innovation and knowledge generation are key components of value creation by firms in a globally connected world. In this project we analyze innovative activity in the over a 35-year period (1975-2010) to understand the nature and extent of international connectedness of U.S. knowledge networks. Our analysis parses a comprehensive dataset comprising the population of USPTO patents to extract information on inventor co-location. We use this to generate a knowledge map of inventor networks for each of the top 35 Core-Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs), tracking innovative activity and connectedness across geography and over time. We find that in the 1975-90 period, inventor numbers and growth rates tracked overall population numbers, so that the large population centers (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia) accounted for the largest shares. However, in the decades between 1990 and 2010, inventor numbers rose most rapidly in West and South, so that by the end of the period the dominant innovative centers of the country were the Silicon Valley CBSAs of San Francisco and San Jose, Austin, Seattle, Portland and San Diego.