Intellectual property rights are at the forefront of today's debates regarding the nature of appropriate institutions for promoting economic growth and development. The proposed project contributes to current understanding of the impact of different institutional designs, by systematically exploring the processes that generated new technological knowledge across and within countries over the critical period from roughly the late-18th through the early 20th centuries. This era provides a natural laboratory to study these issues, because of the substantial variation in the institutional approaches that industrializing societies employed to stimulate more rapid technical progress. The primary data sets comprise two parallel samples of great inventors from the U.S. and Britain, that include rich biographical detail (such as their social background, dates and places of birth, education, employment history, careers at invention, prizes and awards received, wealth, and methods of appropriating returns) along with extensive samples of all the patents they ever received. This material will be combined with evidence from random samples of total patents in each country. The analysis will allow us to determine how differences in patent systems and in the use of other social or governmental inducements for inventive activity were related to the rate, direction, and circumstance of the creation of both incremental and important technical knowledge in these two first industrial nations.
There has long been intense concern with the efficacy and general effects of different institutions for stimulating inventive activity and technical change, but our knowledge remains quite limited and controversy continues. Uniformity in many of the characteristics of modern patent systems precludes quantitative analysis of their impact on patenting and inventive activity. The empirical strategy of this project offers a great deal of potential for improving our understanding of how such institutions worked and evolved in industrializing economies over the long term. The analysis distinguishes between incremental and important inventions; sheds light on the propensity to patent and on the significance of facilitating markets in new technical knowledge embodied in patent assets; and, more generally, assesses institutional sources of variation in the supply of inventive activity. The biographical detail on the great inventors will also allow for studies of the geographic patterns of the generation of significant new technological knowledge, and of the personal characteristics related to individual technological creativity (during stages of the life cycle or over an entire career).
Broader Impacts: This body of work should help inform contemporary debates about the design of intellectual property institutions and technology policy in developing countries. The substantial data sets to be assembled will further provide a valuable resource to other scholars concerned with the record of advance in technological knowledge and innovation during the era in which the processes of sustained economic growth first got under way and began to diffuse internationally. The research findings will be disseminated through journal articles and the publication of a book. These results will be of relevance to interdisciplinary research on the economics of institutions, development studies, technology, history, law, and intellectual property. Finally, the investigators plan to integrate a number of undergraduate and graduate students in all stages of the project and, by providing mentoring and training, will contribute to the education of the next generation of scholars.
