A new dataset to study a century of innovation in Europe and in the US

Innovation is an important driver of potential growth but quantitative evidence on the dynamics of innovative activities in the long-run are hardly documented due to the lack of data, especially in Europe. In this paper, we introduce PatentCity, a novel dataset on the location and nature of patentees from the 19th century using information derived from an automated extraction of relevant information from patent documents published by the German, French, British and US Intellectual Property offices. This dataset has been constructed with the view of facilitating the exploration of the geography of innovation and includes additional information on citizenship and occupation of inventors.