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We provide new insights into the role of individual inventors in innovation. We focus our analysis on prolific inventors in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. We analyse patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to thousands of inventors from those countries between 1975 and 2010 to investigate the role that mobility plays in the behaviour of prolific inventors. We hypothesize that mobility affects : (1) the productivity of prolific inventors and, (2) the value of their inventions. We compare findings for each of the countries with those for inventors in North America, Western Europe and Australia & New Zealand.

The aim of this paper is to provide new insights into (1) the determinants of the value of inventions and (2) the role that mobility plays in the behavior of prolific inventors, whom we identify based on the number of patents exceeding a threshold of productivity. We examine mobility in two dimensions: from firm to firm (inter-firm) and from one technical field to another. We exploit data on patents filed by inventors from five countries (France, the UK, Germany, the US and Japan) in the US Patent and Trademark office during the period from 1975 to 2002. From our regressions we obtain a rich set of results. In particular we show that: (1) as predicted by evolutionary theory, inventor productivity is a positive determinant of invention value, (2) inter-firm mobility is a consistently positive determinant of productivity and (3) technological mobility is a negative determinant. The last implies that the more specialized an inventor is, the higher his productivity is., Le but de ce papier est de fournir de nouveaux éclairages sur (1) les déterminants de la valeur des inventions, (2) le rôle que pourrait jouer la mobilité sur le comportement des inventeurs prolifiques (que nous définissons comme les inventeurs ayant franchi un seuil en termes de productivité). Nous examinons la mobilité entre firmes et entre champs technologiques. Nous exploitons une base de données de brevets déposés à l'US patent office dans la période 1975-2002 et concernant 5 pays (France, Royaume-Uni, Allemagne, USA et Japon). Nous obtenons de 4 régressions pour chacun des pays un riche ensemble de résultats. On montre que : (1) ainsi que le prédit la théorie évolutionniste la productivité de l'inventeur est un déterminant positif de la valeur des inventions (2) dans l'équation de productivité des inventeurs la mobilité inter firme est toujours positive alors que la mobilité technologique est significativement négative. Cela signifie que plus un inventeur est spécialisé (en termes de champs technologiques) plus il est productif en termes d‟inventions.

Première version d'un rapport d'étape du projet ANR MOBINVENT.; In this paper we survey the literature dealing with the category of prolific inventor. We set out some elements regarding nature, scale, significance and impact of the mobility of this population of prolific inventors. In particular the paper suggests an analysis that measures the effects on mobility on individual inventive productivity and the value of invention. We call “prolificness” the capacity to accumulate knowledge and experience through mobility (that is to say through their capital of contacts and interactions).