What do you mean by "mobile"? Multi-applicant inventors in the European Biotech Industry, and their impact of knowledge diffusion

Mobility of inventive workers, such as RD in which case we are at the opposite end of spillovers, and in the realm of markets for technologies. Recent work on academic inventors, that is university scientists responsible for patents owned by more than one business company, suggests that this may indeed be a relevant case. In this paper we follow in the tradition of making use of patent data, with the aim of setting straight a number of methodological issues. By making use of information on the identity and history of those applicant, we then propose a taxonomy of the phenomena behind multi-applicant inventorship, which distinguishes between job mobility, mobility as a result of M&As, and a residual case which we suspect to be dominated by the markets for research and for technologies. We then compare the citation impact monoand multi-applicant inventors, and the different categories of multi-applicant, both in terms of the absolute number of citations received. In this way we can quantify the relevance of job mobility (or other forms of multi-applicant inventorship) for knowledge diffusion. *corresponding author: flaforgia@eco.uninsubria.it