Economic geography of innovation: The effect of gender-related aspects of co-inventor networks on country and regional innovation

Abstract

This paper focuses on the analysis of the effects of inventor networks on country and regional innovation. We use data from an OECD inventor database that spans more than forty years to build collaboration networks in which the network nodes are countries and regions, and linkages are patents produced by inventors from different regions and countries. We first investigate the network that includes all inventors and then analyze the network focusing on women inventors. We argue that both country and regional-level network centrality positively affect country and regional innovation (with stronger effects at the country level), and centrality in collaborations that involve women has an additional positive impact. We also find that women inventors’ share in the pool of inventors is positively associated with innovation quality both at the county and regional levels. Furthermore, our findings indicate that in the network of women inventors, countries and regions that are in cohesive clusters (formed by repeated interactions between interconnected actors) show stronger innovation performance. Our study also highlights important nuances between country-level and region-level effects.