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Title: Inventing modern invention: the professionalization of technological progress in the US

Citation Type: Working Paper

Publication Year: 2024

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Abstract: Between the mid-19th and mid-20th century, the US transformed from an agricultural economy to the frontier in science, technology and industry. We study how the US transitioned from traditional craftsmanship-based to today's science-based innovation. To do so, we digitize half a million pages of patent yearbooks that describe inventors, organizations and technologies on over 1.6M patent and add demographic information from US census records and information on corporate research activities from large-scale repeated surveys on industrial research labs. Starting in 1920, the 19th-century craftsmanship-based invention was, within just 20 years, overtaken by a rapidly emerging new system based on teamwork and a new specialist class of inventors, engineers. This new system relied on a social innovation: industrial research labs. These labs supported high-skill teamwork, replacing the collaborations within families with professional ties in firms and industrial research labs. This shift had wide-ranging consequences. It not only altered the division of labor in invention, but also reshaped the geography of innovation, reestablishing large cities as epicenters of technological progress and introduced new barriers to patenting for women and foreign-born inventors that have persisted into the 21st century.

Url: http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg2408.pdf

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Authors: Hartog, Matte; Gomez-Lievano, Andres; Hausmann, Ricardo; Neffke, Frank

Series Title: Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography

Publication Number: 24.08

Institution: Urecht University

Pages: 1-75

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data

Topics: Education, Labor Force and Occupational Structure

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