The development of novel technologies, the degree to which they affect jobs and the speed with which they spread across regions, firms and industries are key elements in the study of economic growth, economic inequality, entrepreneurship and firm dynamics. Many researchers have sought to understand whether the benefits from the adoption of new technologies accrue primarily to inventors, early investors, highly skilled users, or to society more widely through, for instance, employment and income growth.

Other studies have explored the geography of the development and diffusion of new technologies. One key obstacle to resolving these questions is that it has proven difficult to measure the development and spread of multiple technological advances in a single framework, and to separate those innovations that affect jobs and businesses from those that do not.

This research makes use of the full text of millions of patents and job postings and hundreds of thousands of earnings conference calls over the past two decades to make progress on this challenge. In particular, the authors develop a flexible methodology that allows them to determine which innovations or sets of innovations (“technologies”) affect businesses, trace these back to the locations and firms where they emerged, and track their diffusion through regions, occupations and industries over time. They then use the newly created data to establish five stylized facts about the development and diffusion of disruptive technologies across space, skill levels and other dimensions.

First, the locations where disruptive technologies are developed are geographically highly concentrated, with a handful of urban areas contributing the majority of the early patenting and early employment within each technology.

Second, despite this initial concentration, jobs relating to use or production of the new technologies gradually spread out geographically.

Third, while initial jobs associated with a given technology are typically high- skilled, over time the mean required skill levels of the new jobs declines. Fourth, these trends towards region and skills-broadening are related: low-skill jobs associated with a given technology spread out geographically significantly faster than high-skill ones. Finally, because of the slower spread of high-skill jobs, disruptive technologies continue to offer long-lasting benefits for their pioneer locations, which retain a long-term advantage in these high-quality jobs for multiple decades. These pioneer locations are more likely to arise in areas with universities and high-skilled labour pools.

Policymakers in many parts of the world devote enormous energy to fostering nascent technologies, ranging from efforts to support academic research to luring start-ups from other cities and countries. Such infant industry strategies are often predicated on the notion that early advantages in innovation and employment will yield lasting benefits for regions; particularly in the form of high-quality employment.

The authors introduce an approach to understand which new technologies affect businesses and to trace their diffusion across regions, industries, occupations and firms. They can then map the spread of disruptive technologies in these dimensions, focusing on the hiring associated with each important innovation.

Beyond these core results of the authors’ research, the development and spread of disruptive technologies are key objects of interest in multiple fields of economics. The authors therefore hope that the data they provide as part of their research may prove useful to address a range of additional research questions in the study of economic growth, inequality, entrepreneurship and firm dynamics.