TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lamoreaux,Naomi R.
AU  - Sokoloff,Kenneth L.
TI  - The Decline of the Independent Inventor: A Schumpterian Story?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11654
PY  - 2005
Y2  - October 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11654
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11654.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Naomi R. Lamoreaux
Department of Economics
Yale University
27 Hillhouse Ave., Rm. 39
Box 208269
New Haven, CT 06520-8269
Tel: 203-432-3625
Fax: 203-432-3635
E-Mail: naomi.lamoreaux@yale.edu

Kenneth L. Sokoloff
Department of Economics
UCLA
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA  90095-1477
Tel: 310/825-4249
Fax: 310/825-9528
E-Mail: N/A user is deceased
AB  - Joseph Schumpeter argued in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that the rise of large firms%u2019 investments in in-house R&D spelled the doom of the entrepreneurial innovator.  We explore this idea by analyzing the career patterns of successive cohorts of highly productive inventors from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  We find that over time highly productive inventors were increasingly likely to form long-term attachments with firms.  In the Northeast, these attachments seem to have taken the form of employment positions within large firms, but in the Midwest inventors were more likely to become principals in firms bearing their names.  Entrepreneurship, therefore, was by no means dead, but the increasing capital requirements%u2014both financial and human%u2014for effective invention and the need for inventors to establish a reputation before they could attract support made it more difficult for creative people to pursue careers as inventors.  The relative numbers of highly productive inventors in the population correspondingly decreased, as did rates of patenting per capita.
ER  -