Inventor data for research on migration and innovation

The paper discusses the existing literature on migration and innovation, with special emphasis on empirical studies based on patent and inventor data. Other sources of micro-data are examined, too, for comparative purposes. A pilot database, based on patent filings at the European Patent Office (working name: Ethnic-Inv) is presented. It contains information on individual inventors (identified by means of name disambiguation algorithms amenable of calibration), including their country of residence (from the patent document) and of origin (obtained by experimenting with IBM-GNR, a commercial system for name entity resolution). Preliminary evidence suggests that immigrant inventors contribute to innovation not only in the US, but also in selected European countries, where they often rank among the most productive individuals. Data on returnee inventors to selected countries of origin suggest the phenomenon to be of limited scale, and highly subject to errors of measurement.