Collective invention during the British

By Alessandro Nuvolari. 2004

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper argues that what Robert Allen has termed collective invention settings (that is, settings in which competing firms share technological knowledge) were a crucial source of innovation during the early phases of industrialisation. Until now this has been very little considered in the literature, which has focused on the patent system as the main institutional arrangement driving the rate of innovation. The paper presents one of these collective invention settings, the Cornish mining district, in detail. It studies the specific economic and technical circumstances that led to the emergence of this collective invention setting and analyses its consequences on the rate of techno logical innovation.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/23e69db7d94d8c5340280c58580d66a4dda843b0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Linus Dahlander
2. David M. Gann
3. E. Giuliani

Citations in the corpus

• How open is innovation (2010, background): “A detailed case study of innovation in the Cornish mining district during the industrial revolution also shows that firms revealed their internal findings to their competitors (Nuvolari, 2004).”
• Cluster Absorptive Capacity (2005, background): “(Allen, 1983: 4–5) A similar account was reported by Nuvolari (2004), who provided a collective invention interpretation of the steam pumping engine’s technical change processes in Cornwall during the British Industrial Revolution.”