U.S. tech inventors are highly clustered because of idea spillover

Re:U.S. tech inventors are highly clustered because of idea ... by thesausageking on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @09:05PM (#21330091)

I'm very suspicious of these conclusions based on the dataset. Equating number of patents with "productivity" is questionable and leads to a lot of confounders. For example, most patents are filed by large companies like IBM, which filed 2,000 patents on cloud computing in 2018 alone.

Large companies like IBM value patents more than startups and have dedicated teams that help employees make tons of filings. I would bet this is part of why NY-NJ-PA, where IBM is headquartered, does better than you'd expect. And, Boston, which has no very large patent filers, does worse than you'd expect.

The 12% gain in "productivity" from moving maybe more to do with inventors joining companies that encourage them to file more patents than any real increase in their output.

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Re:U.S. tech inventors are highly clustered because of idea ... by lozaning on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @10:19PM (#21330444)

I dont recall if it was an official policy or more of a guideline, but when I interned at IBM in college if you had less than ~15 patents to your name you'd never be promoted to manager.

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Re:U.S. tech inventors are highly clustered because of idea ... by m463 on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @09:56PM (#21330355)

I would agree, but there seem to be two fields:

"Assignee" which would list IBM and aramonk new york

and

"Inventors" which list the employee names and the city where they individually reside.

IBM employees in other parts of the country show up outside new york

https://patents.justia.com/assignee/international-business-m...

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Re:U.S. tech inventors are highly clustered because of idea ... by C1sc0cat on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:24AM (#21333125)

There are historical antecedents the Royal Society (London) and the Lunar society (Birmingham) in the UK.

You can also see this at work in the games industry there are tons of small games companies clustered around Nottingham because of games workshop - its called the Lead belt.

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Re:U.S. tech inventors are highly clustered because of idea ... by jgmjgm on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @10:13PM (#21330410)

I think the other cause for inflation is that software patents can be rather dubious compared to other fields. It's easier to claim something is a patent when it is really quite trivial (example: one-click shopping). This is harder to in other fields.

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Re:U.S. tech inventors are highly clustered because of idea ... by TulliusCicero on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @05:40AM (#21332888)

It's not an ideal metric, but I can't think of a better one.

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