Migrant inventors as agents of technological change

Abstract

How do regions enter new and distant technological fields? Who is triggering this process? This work addresses these compelling research questions by investigating the role of migrant inventors in the process of technological diversification. Immigrant inventors can indeed act as carriers of knowledge across borders and influence the direction of technological change. We test these latter propositions by using an original dataset of immigrant inventors in the context of European regions during the period 2003–201. Our findings show that: immigrant inventors generate positive local knowledge spillovers; they help their host regions to develop new technological specialisations; they trigger a process of unrelated diversification. Their contribution comes via two main mechanisms: immigrant inventors use their own personal knowledge (knowledge creation); they import knowledge from their home country to the host region (knowledge transfer). Their impact is maximised when their knowledge is not recombined with the local one (in mixed teams of inventors), but it is reused (in teams made by only migrant inventors). Our work contributes to the existing literature of regional diversification by providing fresh evidence of unrelated diversification for European regions and by identifying important agents of structural change. It also contributes to the literature of migration and innovation by adding fresh evidence on European regions and by unveiling some of the mechanisms of immigrants’ knowledge transmission.

Trains of Thought: High-Speed Rail and Innovation in China

“…Thus, we build on the branching literature and look at the technological diversification of Chinese cities (Bahar et al, 2020;Balland et al, 2019;Petralia et al, 2017;Rigby, 2015) by presenting evidence that the probability of a city to diversify into a new technological field is related to the specialization patterns of the cities to which the city connects to through the HSR. Similarly, we also contribute to a recent streams of studies looking at the role of external inputs on the technological diversification paths of cities, which has been less studied in the literature (Elekes et al, 2019;Miguelez and Morrison, 2022;Neffke et al, 2017;Whittle et al, 2020).…”

“…Bahar et al (2014) establish that neighboring countries are very similar in their patterns of comparative advantage, a similarity that decays with distance, suggesting knowledge diffusion as a potential underlying mechanism behind their main findings, although without testing it empirically. Economic geography papers have also looked into diversification induced by external actors, such as, respectively, high-skilled immigrants, non-local entrepreneurs, and co-inventors (Miguelez and Morrison, 2022;Neffke et al, 2017;Whittle et al, 2020;Elekes et al, 2019). Finally, our paper also relates to Gao et al (2021), who explore spillovers across industries and regions in China's regional economic diversification at the province level.…”

“…Yet, as detailed in sections 2 and 3, using patent citations and patent collaborations present a number of drawbacks, some specific to the Chinese case, some other intrinsic to the underlying data. Thus, we rely on the branching literature to study whether cities' technological diversification into new domains is driven by their connection to experienced cities in that domain, thanks to the HSR, which we interpret as evidence of city to city knowledge diffusion (for similar approaches, see Bahar et al 2020;Iasio and Miguelez 2022;Miguelez and Morrison 2022). Table 4 summarizes the results of the diversification model, which includes city-year and technology-year fixed effects, and controls for the number of patents that a city has in a given technology.…”

External linkages and regional diversification in China: The role of foreign multinational enterprises

“…These studies, in fact, suggest that external connections help regions to escape lock-in by tapping into novel and non-redundant knowledge (Boschma, 2021b; Giuliani et al, 2005; Morrison et al, 2013). The nature of these linkages can be rather heterogeneous, ranging from inter-regional inventors’ collaboration (Balland and Boschma, 2021; Whittle et al, 2020) and import-export relations (Andersson et al, 2013), to regional cooperation (Santoalha, 2019), migration flows (Miguelez and Morrison, 2023) and investments by MNEs (Castellani et al, 2022; Elekes et al, 2019), among others. All these channels may bring to the region the missing capabilities needed to unlock the local innovation potential and in turn enable a process of unrelated diversification.…”

International inventor teams and technological variety in multinational enterprises

“…Knowledge transfer and integration are highly dependent on the actions and interactions of individuals, such as inventors, sharing knowledge within the MNE (Castellani et al, 2022). When it comes to the circulation of technological knowledge, inventors are the key characters to observe (Fleming, 2001;Miguelez & Morrison, 2023), since they carry out the actual knowledge-creation processes (Allen & Cohen, 1969). Yet not all inventors are equally effective knowledge creators.…”