How important are cities for atypical inventions? This question motivates the new article Scaling of Atypical Knowledge Combinations in American Metropolitan Areas from 1836 to 2010, written by Lars Mewes and recently published in Economic Geography. Scaling analyses have verified the productivity of cities and demonstrate a superlinear relationship between cities’ population size and invention performance in general. However, little is known about what kinds of inventions correlate with city size. Is the productivity of cities only limited to invention quantity? I shift the focus on the quality of idea creation by investigating how cities influence the art of knowledge combinations. Atypical combinations introduce novel and unexpected linkages between knowledge domains. They express creativity in inventions and are particularly important for technological breakthroughs. Lars Mewes’ study of 174 years of invention history in metropolitan areas in the US reveals a superlinear scaling of atypical combinations with population size. The observed scaling grows over time indicating a geographic shift toward cities since the early twentieth century. The productivity of large cities is thus not only restricted to quantity but also includes quality in invention processes.
Link to the article: doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2019.1567261
