Institutions and Inventive Activity in the First Two Industrial Nations: Evidence from the Great Inventors of Britain and the United States

知识产权是今天关于促进经济增长和发展的适当机构的性质的辩论的首要议题。拟议的项目通过系统地探索在大约18世纪末至20世纪初的关键时期在各国境内产生新技术知识的过程，有助于目前对不同体制设计的影响的理解。这个时代为研究这些问题提供了一个天然的实验室，因为工业化社会为刺激更快的技术进步而采用的制度方法有很大的差异。主要数据集包括来自美国和英国的两个伟大发明家的平行样本，其中包括丰富的传记细节(如他们的社会背景、出生日期和地点、教育、就业历史、发明生涯、获得的奖品和奖励、财富和分配回报的方法)以及他们获得的所有专利的广泛样本。这些材料将与每个国家的专利总数随机抽样的证据相结合。这一分析将使我们能够确定专利制度的差异以及其他社会或政府激励发明活动的使用与这两个最早的工业国创造增量和重要技术知识的速度、方向和环境之间的关系。长期以来，人们一直强烈关注不同机构刺激发明活动和技术变革的效率和总体影响，但我们的知识仍然非常有限，争议仍在继续。现代专利制度的许多特征都是一致的，因此无法对其对专利和发明活动的影响进行量化分析。这个项目的经验性战略提供了很大的潜力，有助于我们更好地理解这些机构如何长期在工业化经济体中运作和演变。该分析区分了增量发明和重要发明；阐明了专利倾向以及促进专利资产中体现的新技术知识市场的重要性；更广泛地说，评估了发明活动供应方面的制度差异来源。伟大发明家的传记细节还将有助于研究产生重大新技术知识的地理模式，以及与个人技术创造力有关的个人特征(在生命周期的各个阶段或整个职业生涯)。广泛影响：这部著作应有助于为当代关于发展中国家知识产权制度和技术政策设计的辩论提供信息。将收集的大量数据集将进一步为其他学者提供宝贵的资源，这些学者关注的是持续经济增长进程最初开始并开始在国际上扩散期间技术知识和创新的进步记录。研究成果将通过期刊文章和一本书的出版来传播。这些结果将对机构经济学、发展研究、技术、历史、法律和知识产权的跨学科研究具有重要意义。最后，调查人员计划将一些本科生和研究生纳入项目的所有阶段，并通过提供指导和培训，为下一代学者的教育做出贡献。

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.