In the 1970s, almost no patents crossed a border through their inventors. Today, nearly one in three do.
Global Mobile Inventors are people who patent in more than one country over their careers — carrying tacit knowledge across borders and seeding new technologies where they land. This is an interactive record of those movements, from 1976 to today.
Based on: Bahar, D., Choudhury, P., Miguelez, E., & Signorelli, S. (2024). Global Mobile Inventors. Journal of Development Economics, 171, 103357. DOI · Research Highlights
A once-rare phenomenon has become a defining feature of global innovation. Two timelines show how fast it grew.
Left: the number of GMI movements recorded in each five-year period. Right: the number of distinct country-to-country routes that were active.
Use the technology filter in the top bar to narrow everything on the site to a single field — say, computing or pharmaceuticals.
Which countries gain mobile inventors, which lose them, and how the balance has shifted over five decades.
Each country is shaded by its inflows (inventors arriving), outflows (inventors leaving), or net flow. Press play to watch the map evolve from 1976 to today, or click any country for its exact numbers.
Click or tap a country on the map to see detailed statistics.
Every ribbon is a route between two countries. The wider the ribbon, the more inventors travelled along it.
This is a Sankey diagram. Origin countries sit on the left, destinations on the right; each corridor is the band connecting them. Hover or tap a band for its count and rank. Use the period player and "show top" control to focus the view.
Click or tap a flow on the diagram to see detailed statistics.
Select a time period to see the top migration corridors for inventors.
Mobile inventors matter most when they are woven into the local network, not just present in it. Here is what that integration looks like.
This feature is in beta — we are still refining the metrics and layout. The technology filter does not apply to this section.
Each dot is an inventor; lines connect people who co-authored a patent. Amber dots are Global Mobile Inventors, teal dots are local inventors. A force layout pulls well-connected people toward the centre. The panel measures whether GMIs sit more centrally than locals — using eigenvector centrality.
Eigenvector centrality from complete network
How this network is built: we include all GMI inventors who patented in the selected country during the period, plus their direct co-inventors. The visualization shows a random sample; centrality statistics are computed from the complete network.
This explorer visualizes 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 paper "Global Mobile Inventors" published in the Journal of Development Economics in 2024 by Bahar, Choudhury, Miguelez, and Signorelli (journal link).
The research shows 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.
It also shows that the first 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 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 release includes more data than the original study and uses PatentsView's 2020 disambiguation update with advanced "Tree Grafting" algorithms to track inventor careers more accurately — resulting in higher GMI counts (≈1.5–2.4× depending on period) due to better tracking, not methodology changes.
The identification of GMIs follows exactly the methodology in Bahar et al. (2024) (journal link). A GMI is identified when an inventor's country of residence changes between consecutive patent filings, using the patent's priority date.
Technology filtering: the filter uses the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) system, organized by 8 sections (e.g., "A — Human Necessities") and ~600 subclasses (e.g., "G06F — Electric Digital Data Processing"). Each GMI movement is assigned to its patent's primary CPC class. About 5% of patents lack CPC data (≈11% for 2021–25, as recent grants may not yet be classified); technology-filtered statistics represent the subset with available CPC data.