Knowledge Bank

From a macro perspective, cities across the world are constantly competing to become sticky places by attracting and retaining the best available people and businesses. To remain competitive in this era of rapid technological change and development, city officials and planners have placed a large emphasis on creating innovative environments. This paper hypothesizes that cities with higher population densities are more successful in such attempts, and evaluates whether or not a relationship exists between population density and innovation. To examine this relationship, USPTO patent data from the years 2000-2015 and R&D spending data from the year 2013 are compared against the population density of 26 unique Combined Statistical Areas (CSAs) or Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs). Ultimately this study finds that both patent data and R&D data are weakly positively related to population density. When removing the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland CSA, a highly innovative outlier, from the dataset the correlation becomes slightly stronger. Finally, this study indicates that population density by CSA may not be the most important population factor to consider when measuring innovation, as total population by CSA provided a stronger correlation to innovation.