Based on: Bahar, D., Choudhury, P., Miguelez, E., & Signorelli, S. (2024). Global Mobile Inventors. Journal of Development Economics, 171, 103357. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103357
Tracking the international movement of patent inventors and knowledge diffusion across borders from 1976 to 2025
Visualizing the flow of inventors between countries. Width represents the number of Global Mobile Inventors moving between origin and destination countries.
Select a time period to see the top migration corridors for inventors.
Geographic distribution of GMI inflows, outflows, and net movement by country.
Select a country on the map to see detailed statistics
How global inventor mobility has evolved over five decades.
This interactive visualization explores Global Mobile Inventors (GMIs) — inventors who patent in multiple countries over their careers, potentially facilitating the emergence of new technologies in the countries they arrive to. It is based on the findings of the research paper "Global Mobile Inventors" published in the Journal of Development Economics in 2024 by Bahar, Choudhury, Miguelez, and Signorelli.
The research shows that GMIs are "superstar" inventors: they have longer careers, patent more frequently, and produce higher quality patents than the average inventor. While fewer than 0.5% of patents in the early 1970s involved a GMI, by 2015 roughly one in three patents involved at least one GMI.
The research also shows that the first few patents filed within a country-technology pair are twice as likely to be invented by a team including a GMI with prior experience in that technology — tangible evidence that GMIs facilitate technology-specific diffusion of knowledge across nations.
The data for this website is derived from the USPTO PatentsView database (November 2024 release), covering over 9 million granted patents from 1976–2025, belonging to over 4 million disambiguated inventors. This latest release includes more data than the one used in the original study, and is based on PatentsView's 2020 disambiguation update which uses advanced "Tree Grafting" algorithms to more accurately track inventor careers, resulting in higher GMI counts (approximately 1.5–2.4x depending on period) due to better tracking, not methodology changes.
The identification of GMIs for this visualization follows exactly the same methodology as in Bahar et al. (2024). A GMI is identified when an inventor's country of residence changes between consecutive patent filings, using the patent's priority date.