The influence of international knowledge connectivity on national and regional technological specialization in the information age

National or regional technological specialization varies across countries or metropolitan regions and fields, and this pattern can shift over time. The central research question is how such shifts in the patterns of technological specialization are affected by the spread of international knowledge connections, and the significance of this relationship in the context of globalization in the information age. In this dissertation, I investigate how changes in the international connectivity of innovative activity (assessed in various ways) have affected national and regional patterns of technological specialization in the post-1976 paradigm of the information and digital age. The research is explored through three studies conducted from three different perspectives on international knowledge connectivity, that correspond to three alternative channels for international knowledge linkages or flows: international knowledge sourcing (the international inventor community channel), migration (the migrant community channel), and international corporate inventor connections (the individual and organizational ties in global inventor teams channel). Study 1 examines the influence of international knowledge sourcing (cross-border citations) on technological specialization at a national level. Study 2 focuses on the effect of migration on regional technological specialization in the US. Study 3 looks at the regional effect of cross-border inventor collaborations by firms in the pharmaceutical industry. I use patent data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and United States Census data on the US regions as my main data sources, while I adopt the index of revealed technological advantage (RTA) to measure technological specialization for countries or regions, and run statistical tests for all three studies. There are three general findings. First, national technological specialization continues to become narrowly concentrated and is influenced positively and significantly by increasing international knowledge connectivity. Second, foreign-born migrants positively and significantly affect regional (CSA) technological specialization. Third, the cross-border pattern of inventor collaborations reflects to some extent the cross-CSA distribution of migrant shares of population from the same country of origin. The dissertation concludes that international knowledge connectivity, whether through international inventor communities, through migration, or through global inventor team collaborations, all work together to shape national and regional technological specialization in the information age.