This chapter documents instances from past centuries where inventors freely shared knowledge of their innovations with other inventors. It is widely believed that such knowledge sharing is a recent development, as in Open Source Software. Our survey shows, instead, that innovators have long...

The diffusion of innovations is supposed to dissipate inventors' rents. Yet in many documented cases, inventors freely shared knowledge with their competitors. Using a model and case studies, this paper explores why sharing did not eliminate inventors' incentives. Each new technology coexisted...

We use patent citation networks to study the dynamics of technical change in Ethernet, a standard for data communication. We first consider the evolution of the broad technological system of local area networks (LANs) and we identify the most significant inventions within the specific subfield...

This chapter documents instances from past centuries where inventors freely shared knowledge of their innovations with other inventors. It is widely believed that such knowledge sharing is largely a recent development, as in open source software. Our survey shows, instead, that innovators have...

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the research on the role played by patent systems in the industrialization process (with a special focus on the British case). Perhaps surprisingly, no consensus has been reached yet as to whether the emergence of modern patent systems exerted a...

The diffusion of innovations is supposed to dissipate inventors' rents. Yet in many documented cases, inventors freely shared knowledge with their competitors. Using a model and case studies, this paper explores why sharing did not eliminate inventors' incentives. Each new technology coexisted...