The processes of innovation and the diffusion of new ideas have undergone an unprecedented transformation in recent decades. One of the drivers of this transformation has been the growing digitalization of economies that allows collaboration between companies located in different parts of the planet. The second has been the globalization of production processes with greater participation of companies in global value chains. And the third is based on the protection provided by international agreements to protect patents. It has been proven that these three forces, digitalization, globalization and protection have contributed positively to the acceleration of these processes: more innovation is done, faster and there is more international collaboration. Likewise, inventors seek to protect their creations in more countries than in the past. But who benefits from these processes? Economic theory indicates that companies innovate to obtain benefits and competitive advantages over their competitors, who will try to imitate new technologies to gain market share. However, if developing a new product is very expensive, but easy to copy and difficult to protect, there are no incentives to innovate. For this reason, the proper functioning of international protection is crucial. With intellectual property rights, national and international legal systems that regulate patents grant exclusivity to the inventor for a limited period of time in exchange for publicly sharing the technical details of the innovation. This incentivizes companies to innovate, since they can register their patents in the corresponding offices. Cross-border patents – when an innovation is patented abroad – are a key channel for the international transfer of technology. In Spain, 24% of patent applications in 2023 were from non-residents. They are essential to promote structural transformation and productive capacity in the Global South and facilitate development within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. This channel is predominant today, with accelerated technological changes, within global value chains and with foreign direct investment linked not only to capital, but also to technology and know-how. To understand the determinants of the increase in cross-border patents, together with researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Drexel University in the United States, we have built an open-access database (INPACT-S) of intra-national and cross-border patents (LaBelle et al., 2023). INPACT-S tracks patents in different countries and industries from 1980 to 2019, showing how the center of gravity of global innovation is moving towards Asia, with China and South Korea as emerging innovators. It also allows us to explore the impact of technology transfers on income inequality from a model based on economic theory. We find that policy measures and the process of globalization have significantly boosted international patent flows, especially from richer to less rich nations, with a remarkable increase of more than 300% between 1995 and 2018. Our analysis also shows that international patents would have been 43% lower in 2018 if we had not been immersed in globalization processes. This means that the reduction of barriers to innovation between developed and developing countries in the last two decades explains a large part of the global increase in international innovation during that period. Not only globalization, but also the strengthening of intellectual property rights – through international agreements – have benefited both developed and developing countries. The North benefits from the reduction of imitation risks, which translates into higher royalty payments by the South, which in turn boosts investments in research and development and production in the North. At the same time, the South benefits from greater technology transfer from the North, which translates into more varieties of products and an increase in production. These results highlight how globalization trends have influenced the dynamics of international patents. It is very positive that both developed and developing countries have benefited from technology transfers, but the latter more, having contributed to reducing the income gap between rich and poor countries, and therefore global inequality. Inmaculada Martínez-Zarzoso is a professor at the universities of Göttingen and Jaume I. Follow all the information on Economy and Business on Facebook and Twitter. Xor in our weekly newsletter