Mercedes Delgado, Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) with Luca Gius, Bocconi University, will present research examining whether female inventors face greater geographical constraints than their male counterparts when collaborating on innovation.
Over the past two decades, innovation teams have become increasingly geographically dispersed. In the United States, patents involving inventors located in multiple cities accounted for around half of all team patents by 2020. While advances in communication technologies have enabled collaboration across distance, important questions remain about whether the costs and challenges of maintaining these relationships are experienced equally by all inventors.
This seminar explores whether geographical dispersion creates gender-specific barriers to collaboration. Drawing on data from U.S. patenting activity, the research investigates the extent to which female inventors are geographically co-located with their co-inventors compared with male inventors. The findings show that female inventors are more likely to be located in the same city as their collaborators, suggesting that distance may present greater challenges for women than for men.
The research further reveals that these differences vary over the career lifecycle. While younger women are less likely than men to be geographically co-located with their collaborators, women's team collocation increases with age and eventually exceeds that of men. In contrast, men's team collocation declines steadily over time. These patterns are consistent with the possibility that women face greater geographical constraints later in their careers, particularly during periods when family responsibilities may be more significant.
The study also finds that inventors located in leading technology clusters experience fewer of these constraints, as opportunities for collaboration are more concentrated geographically. The findings contribute to debates surrounding remote and distributed work, offering new insights into how location continues to shape innovation and collaboration in knowledge-intensive occupations.
About Mercedes Delgado:
Mercedes Delgado is Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), and a Research Affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She teaches strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship courses at the PhD, Master's and executive levels, and is the lead co-director of the MBA Entrepreneurship Concentration at CBS.
Delgado's research focuses on the relationship between the regional business environment and the performance of inventors, firms, regions, and countries. She examines the role of regional clusters, geographic concentrations of related industries, firms, and supporting institutions, in job creation, innovation, entrepreneurship, inclusivity, and resilience. Delgado has developed new methods for defining and mapping industry clusters and the supply chain economy. This work provides frameworks and tools to help firms, practitioners, and policymakers create regional and national innovation strategies.
She is also interested in how to connect businesses in inner cities, economically distressed areas within a city, to their surrounding cities to facilitate inclusive prosperity. At the firm level, she studies the interaction between the spatial organization of firms, their location choices through the value chain, and performance. Her recent work explores the organizational and locational drivers of the inventor gender gap.
Delgado's work has been published in top economic, policy, strategy, and science journals. She has received several prestigious fellowships and research grants, including a graduate fellowship from Fundación Rafael del Pino and a recent National Science Foundation grant on Mapping the Inventor Gender Gap.
Delgado has engaged with multiple stakeholders in innovation ecosystems, including government, hundreds of startups, corporations, universities, and accelerators..
Seminar Details:
The Manchester Institute of Innovation Research runs a series of regular seminars given by visiting speakers to Manchester. These seminars are open to anybody who is interested in science, technology and innovation policy and management.
Refreshments will be available for networking from 3:15 pm, before the seminar.
We encourage AMBS and UoM staff and students to join us in person, with an online option available. External participants are welcome to join online via Teams:
Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/351384732473963?p=SfFJ4I2LK0jifuTcjc
Meeting ID: 351 384 732 473 963
Passcode: HW2V6sf3
