I posted the following two comments to "Lost Einsteins, the Innovations We Are Missing", David Leonhardt, New York Times, 2017-12-03.
One could also make a correlation between innovation and the type of industries in the area.
The Minneapolis-St. Paul area once drew a lot of people to work in the computer industry. I was one of them. Then the medical device industry drew a lot of people.
Rochester MN has been drawing medical talent for generations. It also once had a large IBM facility.
I wonder what all the patents in NW Minnesota were for. Snowmobiles, fishing gear?
And then there is politics. Do the local governments make their places nice places to live, and so many people move there?
Follow-up comment
Well, I looked up several facts about Roseau County, MN, way up north on the Canadian border. It was where Polaris snowmobiles were invented. For more seehttp://www.polaris.com/en-us/company.
The Census 2016 estimate of Roseau’s population is 15,629 with 18% of school age 2813 students. So, it would be quite “easy” for Polaris to have three patents.
The research triangle of North Carolina is another high patent area. The triangle is University of North Carolina, North Carolina State University, and Duke University, all well-known research universities.
I think a more interesting correlation would be how much people were open to new ideas. I think the willingness to do something different would have a better correlation than number of children.
