Preliminary Programme

In this essay, we argue a mainstream dichotomy in the economic history of patenting to be the one between independent inventors versus firms. On this account, it is commonplace to argue decline in importance of the independent in favor of the large firm over time. However, so far researchers have lumped together independent inventors as a homogenous group. Neglecting distinguishing features within the cohort of independent inventors and their possibilities for patenting runs the risk of aggregating away important parts of the story. This essay tackles this problem by analyzing patentee professions in detail and focusing on a third financially strong group. This group consists of the precursor to the corporation: the factory and the factory owners. We make use of a new dataset containing all patents granted in Sweden (1819-1914) along with occupational data on all registered patentees and official statistics on type of factory ownership. We perform the following analyses. First, we examine the relative shares of different professions, by sectors and technology. Secondly, we examine the development of factory ownership during the period to give an overview of the composition of Swedish manufacturing industry at the time. Lastly, we use patent renewal data to assess the quality of patents coming from different professional groups. The results show that about one fifth of all patents were granted to capitalists or factory owners during a time when production was concentrated in individual factories and not corporations. We argue that this calls for a reassessment of the prevalence of the so called individual inventor and that including this third group in the analysis gives us a more accurate picture of the reality of patenting and technological development during the second industrial revolution. (Show less)

The Italian Mezzogiorno – i.e. the Reign of Two Sicilies during the first half of XIX century – was at the edge of the great stream of innovations that interested Euro-pean economy during the XIX century. However, this does not mean that the Reign was completely excluded from the processes elsewhere transforming both the pro-duction and consumption. Which was the effective participation of the Reign to the new technological paradigms that were imposing at international level? Scholars are very sceptical about this matter: the geographic marginality of Italian Mezzogiorno, worse by far to others economic and political problems, caused a technological gap still visible up to today. Nevertheless, this opinion seems too tranchant: in fact we know that in the Reign there was both a successfully importation of technology as well as several original inventions. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper, whose sources consist of the patents registered in the Reign from 1810 up to 1861, is to un-derline the work of several inventors, both local and foreign, who tried to modernize the productive system by means of their inventions.
The exposition is divided in three parts. The first one examines the legislation on the intellectual property and proposes some data concerning patents. In the second part, I introduce the inventors: who were the men that tried to modernize the productive structure of the Reign? The third part exposes the main conclusions of the research: in particular the evidence that the experience of the Reign of Two Sicilies is useful to understand the attitude towards the technological innovation that would have been typical of the whole of Italy starting from the second half of XIXth century up to to-day. (Show less)

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, American corporations began their multinational expansion in Europe through direct investments in the most developed economies. Being increasingly aware of scientific and technological knowledge business value, they also began to develop early IPR international protection strategies in order to defend their intangible assets abroad. Before World War II, many of those multinationals had also reached lagging peripheral countries, resulting in a complex European network of subsidiaries and affiliates scarcely studied. This article delves into Babcock & Wilcox pre-1939 entrepreneurial conglomerate –one of the most interesting case studies of early multinational expansion- for analyzing how they landed up at Spain, what their business and entrepreneurial strategies in that market were, and what the role of patent management in that process was. Our findings reveal that corporate interests in patent capture, control, and administration not only shifted research and innovation handling within firms, but also led to a quick learning on how to successfully use IPRs as business, legal, and organizational tools for their international spread. (Show less)

Analysing 474 cases of firms going public in the German capital between 1892 and 1913, we show that innovative firms could rely on the Berlin stock market as a source of financing. The data also reveal that initial public offerings (IPO) of innovative firms were characterized by particularly low underprizing, comparatively high first trading prices, and no long-run underperformance. We interpret these empirical results as evidence for the surprising fact that contemporary investors had rational expectations. (Show less)

This paper uses renewal data to estimate the value of Italian patents during the so-called Liberal Age (1861-1913) controlling for inventor and patent characteristics. We make use of a new dataset comprising all patents granted in Italy in five benchmark years: 1864-65, 1881, 1891, 1902 and 1911. Using renewal data, we estimate both the value of patents “ex-ante” (that is in the moment in which the patent was granted) and “ex-post” (that is in the moment in which the patent expires). Overall, we find a highly skewed distribution of patent values. Furthermore, we find that patents issued to firms and to foreign inventors and patents covering high-tech inventions are more “valuable” than those issued to independent inventors and domestic inventors or in low-tech sectors. (Show less)