Who Invents?: Evidence from the Japan-US Inventor Survey

SUMMARY Human resources are increasingly seen as a key to innovation competitiveness, and there is a need for detailed, systematic data on the demographics of inventors, their motivations, and their careers. To gain systematic data on who invents, we collected detailed information on a sample of inventors in the US and Japan (the RIETI-Georgia Tech inventor survey). The data come from a unique set of matched surveys of US and Japanese inventors of triadic patents, i.e., patents from patent families with granted patents in the US and applications filed in Japan and in the EPO, with data from over 1900 responses from the US and over 3600 responses from Japan. Based on these survey data, we compare the profiles, motivations, mobility and performance of inventors in the US and Japan. Overall, we find some important similarities between inventors in the US and Japan. The distribution across functional affiliations within the firm, by gender, by 1 We would like to thank Oikawa and Masahisa Fujita for the advice and support to the inventor surveys in Japan and the US. We would like to thank for the comments we received at the RIETI international conference and seminar, including those by Richard Nelson, Bronwyn Hall and Fumio Kodama, as well as at the International Schumpeter Association Meeting in Brazil 2008. We would like to thank for the invaluable administrative educational fields and their motivations, are all quite similar. In particular, in both countries we find inventors emphasizing task motivations over pecuniary motivations. Firm-centered motivation (e.g., generating value for my firm) is also an important reason for inventing and this reason is relatively more important in the US than Japan. Their distribution across types of organizations is quite similar. The percent of university inventors is nearly the same in the two countries, and the distribution of these inventors across technology classes is also quite similar. However, the percent from very small firms is significantly higher in the US. There are a few important differences. American inventors are much more likely to have a PhD. American inventors are older (even controlling for differences in the share of the inventors with PhDs). The modal Japanese inventor has his first invention in his 20s, while for the US, the mode is the early 30s, and we also find many more American inventors over age 55 at the time of their triadic patent invention. In both countries, older …