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Inventors, Patents, and Inventive Activities in the English Brewing Industry, 1634–1850
Nuvolari, Alessandro; Sumner, James
Business History Review. 2013;87(Special Issue 01):95-120.
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Abstract
This article examines the relationship between patents, appropriabilitystrategies, and market for technology in the Englishbrewing industry before 1850. Previous research has pointedto the apparent paradox that large-scale brewing in this periodshowed both a self-aware culture of rapid technologicalinnovation and a remarkably low propensity to patent. Ourstudy records how brewery innovators pursued a wide varietyof highly distinct appropriability strategies, including secrecy,selective revealing, open innovation and knowledge-sharingfor reputational reasons, and patenting. All these strategiescould co-exist, although some brewery insiders maintaineda suspicion of the promoters of patent technologies, whichfaded only in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, we fi ndevidence that sophisticated strategies of selective revealingcould support trade in inventions even without the use of thepatent system.