Geographic Patterns of Innovation Across U.S. States: 1980-2010

knowledge creation since the early 1980s, becoming one of the world leaders of innovation. A standard measure of innovation that academics, governments, and businesses use is the number of patents granted. By 2010, the number of new patents granted in the United States was almost three times larger than in 1980.1 A similar trend emerges when looking at new patents granted per 1,000 residents (Figure 1). While the United States has become more innovative overall, not all geographic areas have contributed equally to this upward trend. In this essay, we analyze state-level data on patents granted between 1980 and 2010 and document several features of the geographic distribution of U.S. innovation. First, we find that the rate at which patents are granted is highly heterogeneous across U.S. states. Figure 2 shows the distribution of patent creation across U.S. states in the 1980s (left panel) and 2000s (right panel). Darker colors represent states where patents were created at a faster pace. In the 2000s, patent creation was concentrated mostly in three regions: Geographic Patterns of Innovation Across U.S. States: 1980-2010