Inventors, Patents and Inventive Activities in the English Brewing Industry, 1634-1850

Alessandro Nuvolari and James Sumner

LEM Papers Series from Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between patents, appropriability strategies and market for technologies in the English brewing industry before 1850. Previous research has pointed to the apparent oddity that large-scale brewing in this period was characterized both by a self-aware culture of rapid technological innovation, and by a remarkably low propensity to patent. Our study records how brewery innovators pursued a wide variety of highly distinct appropriability strategies, including secrecy, selective revealing, patenting, and open innovation and knowledge-sharing for reputational reasons. All these strategies could co-exist, although some brewery insiders maintained a suspicion of the promoters of patent technologies which faded only in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, we find evidence that sophisticated strategies of selective revealing could support trade in inventions even without the use of the patent system.

Date: 2012-10-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-knm and nep-tid
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lem.sssup.it/WPLem/files/2012-18.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Inventors, Patents, and Inventive Activities in the English Brewing Industry, 1634–1850 (2013)
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:ssa:lemwps:2012/18

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LEM Papers Series from Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).