Maestrejuan, Andrea R. --- "Managing invention: Setting the boundaries of ownership" [2013] ELECD 948; in Arapostathis, Stathis; Dutfield, Graham (eds), "Knowledge Management and Intellectual Property" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013) 44

Book Title: Knowledge Management and Intellectual Property

Editor(s): Arapostathis, Stathis; Dutfield, Graham

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857934383

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: Managing invention: Setting the boundaries of ownership

Author(s): Maestrejuan, Andrea R.

Number of pages: 18

Abstract/Description:

By the end of the nineteenth century, German firms were changing the face of invention. The world of the workshop in which the lone inventor toiled in vain was giving way to the industrial research laboratory staffed by a fleet of for-hire employee-inventors. Invention, as one scholar has described it, had become ‘industrialized’ (Meyer-Thurow, 1982). While German independent inventors remained a significant source of new technology, firms became increasingly important players in the generation of new technology. The success of firms in achieving significant advantages by combining inventive activity with the commercial exploitation of the patented technology by creating in-house research and development laboratories is well documented (Lamoreaux and Sokoloff, 2005a; 2005b). Even before unification and the adoption of a national patent law to encourage inventive activity, German firms had already ‘borrowed’ extensively from technology developed in other countries to ‘catch up’. At the same time, German states were introducing educational reforms to create a formally educated class of specialists trained in R & D. When the first national patent law was finally passed, firms were already employing these highly educated workers to routinize improvements in technology and to rely less on technology developed outside of the firm. These advantages are particularly true of the German dyestuff and pharmaceutical industry. Scholars use the emergence of the German chemical industry during the nineteenth century as a key example of the success of the corporate research laboratory to propel Germany down its ‘peculiar’ path of rapid industrialization by the mid-nineteenth century.