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Journal of Economic Geography Advance Access originally published online on October 29, 2008
Journal of Economic Geography 2009 9(1):1-31; doi:10.1093/jeg/lbn042
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Right arrow O14 - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology
Right arrow O31 - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
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Right arrow R12 - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Spatial diversity in invention: evidence from the early R&D labs

Tom Nicholas*

*Entrepreneurial Management Group, Harvard Business School, Boston MA, 02163, USA. email <tnicholas{at}hbs.edu>

JEL classifications: O31, O32, O14, R12

This article uses historical data on inventor and firm research and development (R&D) lab locations to examine the technological and geographic structure of corporate knowledge capital accumulation during a formative period in the organization of United States innovation. Despite the localization of inventive activity around the labs, one-quarter of inventors lived outside a 30 mile commuting radius of the nearest facility of the firm they assigned their patents to. A strong positive effect of distance from a lab on technological importance is identified, especially for inventors from large cities that were geographically separated from a firm's; labs. A patent case–control method helps explain spatial sourcing by showing that the average quality of externally available inventions was high. Firms selected complementary, not substitute, inventions from non-lab urban locations, suggesting a link between the organization and the geography of innovation.

Keywords: R&D, invention, location, cities
Date submitted: 8 December 2007     Date accepted: 30 September 2008


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