Patent generation in US metropolitan areas

This chapter examines (utility) patents across US metropolitan areas in 1990–2015, a period when patent volumes became increasingly concentrated in the nation’s largest places. To begin, estimates of these volumes are made at five-year intervals using only population size as an explanatory variable. Other cross-sectional patenting estimates follow, based on twenty-plus metropolitan attributes, including: education of the workforce, industrial specialization, location (climate), average wages, per capita GDP, and various human-created amenities. A multivariate approach captures some of the key differences in the metropolitan innovation ecosystems. (Ordinal) performance scores are estimated for six separate orthogonal factors and, together, they provide a performance vector for each metropolitan economy. Linear regression next indicates that three factors, Economic Size, Location, and Industrial Specialization, have become especially important in US metropolitan patent generation during recent times. The pattern of estimates for patent densities, or per capita patenting volumes, is shown to be remarkably similar.