In this paper, we argue that together with individual inventors and firms, what Robert C. Allen (1983) has termed as collective invention settings (that is settings in which rival firms freely release each other pertinent technical information), were also a crucial source of innovation in the...

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of recent research on the role of patent systems in the early phases of industrialization. Perhaps surprisingly, no consensus has been reached yet as to whether the emergence of modern patent systems exerted a favourable impact on inventive...

This paper tries to bring new insights on the dynamics of inter-firm by focusing on cognitive and organisational dimensions. We consider the knowledge bases created inside the agreement and the characteristics of such knowledge bases (such as tacitness, level of generality, degree of...