We provide new insights into the role of individual inventors in innovation. We focus our analysis on prolific inventors in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. We analyse patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to thousands of inventors from those countries between 1975 and 2010 to investigate the role that mobility plays in the behaviour of prolific inventors. We hypothesize that mobility affects : (1) the productivity of prolific inventors and, (2) the value of their inventions. We compare findings for each of the countries with those for inventors in North America, Western Europe and Australia & New Zealand.