Same difference? Minority ethnic inventors, diversity and innovation in the UK

By Max Nathan. 2015

127 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Minority ethnic inventors play important roles in US innovation, especially in high-tech regions such as Silicon Valley. Do ‘ethnicity–innovation’ channels exist elsewhere? Ethnicity could influence innovation via production complementarities from diverse inventor communities, co-ethnic network externalities or individual ‘stars’. I explore these issues using new UK patents microdata and a novel name-classification system. UK minority ethnic inventors are spatially concentrated, as in the USA, but have different characteristics reflecting UK-specific geography and history. I find that the diversity of inventor communities helps raise individual patenting, with suggestive influence of East Asian-origin stars. Majority inventors may benefit from multiplier effects.

Subfields: Demography, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/000023595ca65bacf7ed90de4d63cd3223ff3cbf

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In Sociology and Political Science

1. F. Montobbio
2. Claudio Fassio
3. A. Venturini

Citations in the corpus

• Skilled migration and innovation in European industries (2019, background): “A second set of explanations focuses on the impact of ethnical diversity on innovation (e.g. Ottaviano and Peri 2012; Østergaard et al. 2011; Ozgen et al. 2012; Nathan and Lee, 2013; Parrotta et al. 2014; Nathan, 2015).”
• High-Skilled Migration and Agglomeration (2017, unknown): “However, positive net impacts of national diversity on innovation are observed in several European countries (see, e.g., Ozgen et al. 2011; Bosetti et al. 2015; Parrotta et al. 2014; Breschi et al. 2014, 2015; Nathan 2015).”