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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]

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]

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]