There has been a lot of talk about how the "Creative class" is leaving big cities for life in out-doorsy places like Utah or Seattle. While there may be some truth to that (and this article tries to prove the point), this summary of patents is rather astonishing.
If you look at the number of patents from the top 20 US cities, Silicon Valley accounts for 63%! 11 of the top 20 cities are located in the SF-Bay area. (Seattle makes the list; right behind Portland. Ouch :(
Patents arent everything but I guess there really is something different when it comes to California.
The Most Inventive Towns in America
The tinkerers who helped build America haven't disappeared -- they're right next door. Our search for small-town patent hubs found surprising innovations from coast to coast.
July 22, 2006
What is changing: their ZIP Codes. Combing through the more than 475,000 U.S. patents granted in the past four years reveals a new map of the places where individual inventors are busy dreaming and tinkering. This shifting geography of innovation says a lot about how the American economy is changing -- and underscores its resilience.
For our survey of the most inventive towns in America, we looked first at the number of utility patents granted to inventors in about 12,000 cities, using data compiled by research firm iPiQ, a consulting concern that analyzes intellectual property for companies. The idea was to look beyond big high-tech centers like Santa Clara, Calif., where Intel is based, and find places that are hubs for inventions by individuals or small businesses. As a proxy for this, iPiQ recommended using its historical database of U.S. patents to filter out companies that had previously been awarded substantial numbers of patents (see "Behind the Numbers").
