There is a widely held belief that agglomeration economies encourage significantly more successful and productive innovation activities. Based on this belief some scholars even suggest that policies designed to stimulate innovation in non-urban areas are ineffective and a waste of resources. Investigating the geographic concentration of patented inventions in 14 developed countries, we find that in most countries patenting is geographically dispersed with considerable shares of patented inventions in areas other than large cities. South Korea and the US are two extreme outliers where patenting is highly concentrated in some large cities. Also, there is no general tendency that inventors in large cities are more productive, in terms of filing patents, when compared to inventors in rural areas. We conclude that while the agglomeration economies found in large cities may offer advantages for innovation activities, the extent of these advantages is not significant, and popular theories overemphasize the importance of large cities for innovation activities.

人们普遍认为，集聚经济会鼓励更加成功和富有生产力的创新活动。基于这种信念，一些学者甚至提出，旨在刺激非城市地区创新的政策是无效的，并且浪费了资源。通过调查14个发达国家的专利发明的地域集中度，我们发现在大多数国家中，专利在地理上分布很分散，在大城市以外的其他地区也有相当数量的专利发明。韩国和美国是两个极端的例外，其专利高度集中在一些大城市。而且，与农村地区的发明人相比，就专利申请而言，大城市的发明人普遍没有更高的生产率。