Sources: Inventors and Inventions

Science dependence of technologies: evidence from inventions and their inventors

Articulating a compelling economic rationale to justify investments in research by definition furthest removed from direct, immediate economic benefit is perhaps one of chief challenges of R&D managers, policy makers and science analysts in the years ahead. Although several innovation studies and surveys have provided some convincing empirical evidence of impacts and benefits of research to tec...

The Foundations of Virology: Discoverers and Discoveries, Inventors and Inventions, Developers and Technologies

History of science is not a priority of most virologists. However, if given a visually engaging coffee-table book of the persons and discoveries that shaped the field of virology since Hippocrates, curious scientists will inevitably start paging through history. For this reason, every chairperson of virology departments worldwide should leave a copy of Fred Murphy’s The Foundations of Virology ...

Collective Knowledge, Prolific Inventors and the Value of Inventions: An Empirical Study of French, German and British Owned

Lone Inventors as Sources of Breakthroughs: Myth or Reality?

How does collaboration influence creativity and, in particular, the invention of breakthroughs? Recent research has attempted to resolve this question by considering the variance of creative outcomes, implicitly assuming that greater probability of breakthroughs comes at the cost of greater probability of particularly poor outcomes. However, through an examination of the overall distribution of...

The Lifecycle of Inventors∗

We use administrative records on the population of individuals who applied for or were granted a patent between 1996 and 2014 to characterize the lives of more than 1.2 million inventors in the United States. We show that children of low-income parents are much less likely to become inventors than their higher-income counterparts (as are minorities and women). Decompositions using third grade a...