The Decline of the Independent Inventor: A Schumpterian Story?

Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Kenneth Sokoloff

No 11654, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Joseph Schumpeter argued in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that the rise of large firms' investments in in-house R&D spelled the doom of the entrepreneurial innovator. We explore this idea by analyzing the career patterns of successive cohorts of highly productive inventors from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We find that over time highly productive inventors were increasingly likely to form long-term attachments with firms. In the Northeast, these attachments seem to have taken the form of employment positions within large firms, but in the Midwest inventors were more likely to become principals in firms bearing their names. Entrepreneurship, therefore, was by no means dead, but the increasing capital requirements—both financial and human—for effective invention and the need for inventors to establish a reputation before they could attract support made it more difficult for creative people to pursue careers as inventors. The relative numbers of highly productive inventors in the population correspondingly decreased, as did rates of patenting per capita.

JEL-codes: N O (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-ent, nep-ino and nep-tid
Note: DAE PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11654.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11654

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11654

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().