Inter-regional highly skilled worker mobility and technological novelty

This article proposes an empirical approach to study how regions introduce true technological novelty by exploring the effect of geographically mobile workers on new technological classes combinations within patents filled. Migration has been shown to raise innovation activity (quantity and entry) at destination, but the question whether workers’ mobility allows new combinations in technological portfolio remained unanswered. Empirically, we investigate if high skilled workers moving from regions with a revealed comparative advantage in a given technological class spark new technological combinations in the destination region. We test this hypothesis using both official administrative labor mobility data and pairs of combination of technological codes present in patent data between 1996 and 2017. We find that workers coming from regions specialized in a given technology subclass drive technological novelty in this subclass at destination. This effect is present only for subclasses related to the local technological portfolio at destination and is both present for reuse and creation-type novelties. Results imply that local absorptive capacity and a complementarity between internal dynamics and exogenous drivers are important for regions to diversify their technological space.