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

Abstract

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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 125 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.