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Research Summary: Why do inventors facing similar feedback from the technological environment differ in their propensity to search locally or distantly? Problem‐driven decision calculus tends not to sufficiently explain such heterogeneity. We instead examine the individual inventor's calculus surrounding career concern. We propose that with reduced technological opportunities in her local domains, the ensuing career concern induces her to search distantly. This response is attenuated when career concern is less salient—she is relatively productive within the firm or is a star—or when opportunity cost of response is higher—she has more firm‐specific experience or interdependent knowledge. Data from the US electronic industry support our propositions. Findings help explain differential search in response to common problems and illustrate how personal interest intermingles with problem‐driven feedback driving search. Managerial Summary: A firm relies heavily on its inventors' search for new, distant technologies to stay on technological frontiers. Faced with technological decline, which of its inventors will engage in this distant search? We bring inventors' career concern into consideration and use data from the US electronic industry to show that, counterintuitively, it is the relatively less‐productive, nonstar inventors with less firm‐specific inventive experience or less interdependence with the rest of the firm's technologies that will more likely engage in distant search. This stresses that managers, in trying to comprehend their inventors' behavior and mindsets, must go beyond understanding how inventors interpret technological problems they are trying to solve, to also consider these inventors' personal concerns which will affect the way they search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical investigations of the geography of invention, especially regional knowledge production functions, attempt to pinpoint determinants of patenting intensity. They depict organizations reflexively locating their assets in response to place-based attributes. The inordinate concentration of patent generation in large metropolitan areas amplifies this perspective. However, organizational formation, patenting behaviours, and general economic development evolve from long-run endogenous processes that challenge causal modelling. A research design that reassesses the relationships between the access to and use of internal and external resources and invention intensity is employed. The focus is on secondary metropolitan areas exhibiting a variety of dominant organizational forms and functional integration with larger population centres. Results suggest that integration within large population centres positively correlates with invention intensity. In geographically detached places, engagement by technologically sophisticated corporate champions associates with higher invention rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This paper emphasizes the importance of isolating individual invention from organizational inventors such as private companies or universities. It is an explorative study of the cross-county levels of individual patenting as an indicator of innovative capacity. Innovative capacity at the national level is linked to economic development. Thus, we investigate the relationship between different types of patent applications and GDP per capita in a sample of developed and developing economies. Research Design & Methods: We screened 600,000 Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications for three years (2013-2015) using a unique selection procedure able to separate different types of filings. Findings: Countries with higher levels of individual patenting tend to have lower levels of economic development. Economic progress is driven by corporate or other forms of organizational inventors and their inventions have a better chance of transitioning into innovation. At the macro level, individual patenting vis-à-vis patents filed by organizations reflects unutilized innovative potential rather than innovative output. Contribution & Value Added: For the first time we demonstrate that high levels of individual patenting are more characteristic of developing rather than developed economies. The percentage of individual patent applications is an important indicator of national innovative capacity.

This study examines whether inventors' past stock of inventions affects the rate at which they produce technological breakthroughs, as well as the role of organizational contingencies in moderating this effect. The breakthrough rate depends on the rate at which an inventor generates inventions and the probability that each of these inventions is a breakthrough. We argue that inventors with larger patent records generate a higher rate of inventions, but the single inventions that they generate each have a lower probability of being a breakthrough. Longitudinal data of 5,144 European inventors and fixed-effects estimation confirm these predictions and reveal that the net effect of the inventors' stock of past inventions on the breakthrough rate is positive--that is, more established inventors display a higher rate of breakthroughs than brand-new inventors. We also confirm the role of organizational contexts in shaping inventors' productivity. In particular, firms' control over research and development targets lessens the advantage of established inventors with regard to the rate of breakthrough generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study explores the experiences of individual inventors trying to protect, patent, and utilize their inventions. The paper also examines the extent to which inventors received public support. Drawing on an analysis of 33 case studies of Finnish independent inventors, the study explores the extent to which the inventor types correspond with access to certain support measures and commercialization success. The findings suggest that different types of inventors and their patents concur with different levels of access to and use of support measures. Access to innovation support does not necessarily coincide with commercialization success. At times, inventor categories with some success in utilizing patented inventions coincided with little support and advice from public organizations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Inasmuch as the efforts of independent inventors are appreciated at all, it is commonly argued that greater benefit would ensue from their inventions if the inventors possessed a more realistic understanding of the innovative process, and if the world were generally more sympathetic. There is sense in this view, but perhaps some consideration should be given to the impact such changes might have on the essential creativity of the independent inventor. It seems likely that this creativity is in part a product of adversity and might well be extinguished if conditions were made more conducive to the activities of the independent inventor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]