Urban Economic Fitness and Complexity from Patent Data

TL;DR

This paper uses patent data from 1980 to 2014 to analyze how technological innovation influences urban economic development, identifying patterns and clusters of metropolitan areas and linking innovation to GDP growth.

Contribution

It introduces a network-based approach to characterize metropolitan innovation profiles and extends the concept of coherent diversification to patent production, connecting innovation with economic growth.

Findings

Identifies clusters of metropolitan areas based on patent data.

Shows coherent diversification in patent production influences economic growth.

Confirms technological innovation as a driver of urban economic development.

Abstract

Over the years, the growing availability of extensive datasets about registered patents allowed researchers to better understand technological innovation drivers. In this work, we investigate how the technological contents of patents characterise the development of metropolitan areas and how innovation is related to GDP per capita. Exploiting worldwide data from 1980 to 2014, and through network-based techniques that only use information about patents, we identify coherent distinguished groups of metropolitan areas, either clustered in the same geographical area or similar from an economic point of view. We also extend the concept of coherent diversification to patent production by showing how it represents a decisive factor in the economic growth of metropolitan areas. These results confirm a picture in which technological innovation can lead and steer the economic development of cities, opening, in this way, the possibility of adopting the tools introduced here to investigate the interplay between urban development and technological innovation.