Innovation Hubs - A Story of Cities and Patents
Abstract
In recent years there has been great interest around cities and their new product output, where they are usually labeled as ‘innovation hubs’ or ‘tech hubs’. This capstone project will investigate the factors that facilitate innovation growth within a city using publicly available patent data. To understand how this process develops, we will analyze patent data in the United States from 2001-2012. Our regression analysis will explore many features that influence the growth of innovation. Upon running multiple analyses across the years we find that there are certain features that have higher influence on patent output amongst the top cities. We also find these features are missing among cities with less patent output. What this experiment would recommend to cities desiring greater patent output is that they should invest in higher education, in earning Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants, and looking into becoming empowerment zones.
How we Measure Innovation
Ever since the first Patent Act of the U.S. Congress in 1790, the patent has been a key representation of innovation and progress in the United States.[1] Keeping that in mind, this project looks into the ecosystem of innovation in the United States using the registry of patents as its foundational aspect.
Using patent information is a well-established strategy for understanding the development of technology, and spread of information as it relates to economic growth. It has been explained that there has been use of patent data to explore topics such as inventive activity, the scale of manufacturing in cities and the factors which drive technological advances in a region.