In Charts: Like Einstein, Global Inventors Bring Big Ideas Across Borders

German Jewish scientists, including Albert Einstein, reshaped US innovation after fleeing the Nazis. Similarly, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Soviet mathematicians significantly impacted the field in the US.

These examples illustrate how innovation can follow inventors and expand. In fact, a recent study finds that inventors who develop a new technology before emigrating are 70 percent more likely than local inventors to become pioneers of that technology in the countries where they move.

“This ‘Einstein’ phenomenon is not an isolated one. Inventors who move across borders—or global mobile inventors as we refer to them—are a rising global phenomenon leaving a clear footprint in the diffusion of technologies,” says "Global Mobile Inventors," a study published in the Journal of Development Economics that was coauthored by Harvard Business School's Prithwiraj Choudhury.

At a time when immigration has become a flashpoint in many countries, the team analysis of more 6 million patents reveals how so-called global mobile inventors have shared their expertise, especially during the past 20 years. The researchers used records from the US Patent and Trademark Office encompassing 50 years, from 1970 to 2015 and almost 3.5 million inventors.

Choudhury, the Lumry Family Associate Professor, conducted the research with Brown University professor Dany Bahar, a senior research fellow at the Harvard Center for International Development's Growth Lab; University of Barcelona professor Ernest Miguelez, formerly of the Spanish National Research Council; and Sara Signorelli, a professor at the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics at École Polytechnique.

Global mobile inventors aren’t your typical engineers, the authors say. They’re highly productive and tend to become a field’s “superstars,” exerting growing influence.

“As such, they are among the few inventors able to transfer knowledge across borders, sharing it with locals, and pioneer the development of new technological life cycles in the receiving countries,” the researchers write.

Their analysis found that global mobile inventors are key to introducing new technologies. Inventors who had filed at least one patent later played prominent roles in the future innovation of that technology when they moved abroad.

The authors studied the lifecycle of 623 technology classes in more than 200 countries where investors lived, and documented how the flow of these “superstars” across countries has changed over the years. The most significant movements happened among western countries and Japan, with the US leading, in the 1980s and ‘90s. However, these “corridors of inventor mobility,” as the researchers describe them, started to change in the early 2000s, when China, Korea, and India climbed to the top 10.

How can policymakers incorporate these findings?

Countries and companies can foster innovation and productivity by encouraging scientists and inventors to migrate and bring their knowledge and expertise. To spark the diffusion of that knowledge, countries must also focus on effectively integrating these global experts into local inventor networks.

“Immigrant inventors serve as agents of knowledge diffusion,” the researchers concluded.

Image: Ariana Cohen-Halberstam with assets from Adobe Stock