Publisher:
United Nations University (UNU), Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT), Maastricht
Abstract:
This paper investigates how science affects the geographical evolution of technological trajectories. We define a technological trajectory as a series of inventions re-using the same technology, and we follow the geographical development of trajectories by geo-localizing inventors. Following 10,782 trajectories, we find that technologies with a high scientific content travel longer distances and are more likely to generate new inventors' clusters than technologies with low scientific content, especially in their growth and maturity phases.