“Invention and the Life Course: Age Differences in Patenting”, 2023 ():
Developed a new database of the age of US residing inventors from patents
Older inventors have more backward citations and originality measures.
Younger inventors have more forward citations, number of claims, and generality measures.
These patterns are consistent with age-related changes in fluid and crystalized intelligence.
Previous research suggests creative ability peaks at ages between the mid 30s and early 40s, but has not focused on the role of age-related changes in cognitive abilities in this pattern. Cognitive processes show aging-related increases in experience-based knowledge (pragmatics or crystallized abilities) and decreases in the ability to process novel information quickly and efficiently (mechanics or fluid abilities).
We explore the role of these age-related changes in the invention process, using a new database created by combining the publicly available patent data with information on inventor ages scraped from directory websites for ~1.2 million U.S.-resident inventors patenting 1976–412017. We have made these data publicly available on the Harvard Dataverse and full documentation can be found in et al 2021.
In the current paper, we present some descriptive statistics, and explore changing patterns of invention as inventor’s age:
For solo inventors, backward citations and originality increase with age, consistent with their being connected to crystallized intelligence.
Forward citations, number of claims, and generality measures, as well as a citation-based measure of disruptiveness decline with inventor age, consistent with a connection to fluid intelligence.
A similar pattern was found for performance in teams based on the average age of inventors in the team.
Exploration of age diversity showed that teams with a wider age range had patents that are slightly more important (ie. with more forward citations).
Merging of these new data with other data that capture diverse aspects of inventors’ environment and incentives offers rich potential for new research on invention.
[Keywords: inventors, life course, patenting activity, cognitive aging]
…The only previous studies of patents as a function of age are in Sweden (2014), Korea (2018), and two studies looking at a subsample of US inventors (2009; et al 2016). These studies similarly find patenting rates to rise early in inventors’ careers, peak around age 40, and then decline. Much of the previous work on age and creativity is cross-sectional, looking at the age distribution of creators within samples of achievements. Such analysis confounds how the abilities of individuals change over their life with selection into and out of the creative activity ( et al 2020). By looking at 3 million patents associated with 1.4 million inventors over the period 1976–422018, we can complement cross-sectional comparisons with fixed-effects estimation that mitigates selection issues. We have also made the new dataset publicly available with extensive documentation ( et al 2021), and discuss below further research opportunities that can be explored by matching these data to other information about the inventors.