The workshop is a moment of exchange between PhD researchers and Post-docs working on historical projects dealing with patents and innovation and senior researchers. The workshop will also have sessions devoted to possible collobaration between different European countries with a view at creating a data-hub on historical patent statics.

Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands

June 23-26, 2009

Organizer: Alessandro Nuvolari

• Summary

Innovation has long been recognized as a fundamental driver of economic growth both by economists and economic historians. However, it has been very difficult to provide exact measures of innovations and of their economic impact. Patent statistics has been one of the most popular indicators of innovation employed so far by economic historians. The most notable advantage of patents is that they are available for long historical periods and for many countries. It is not surprising then that patent information has been frequently used to construct historical indicators of innovation.

Although much progress has been obtained in this way, it is well known that indicators of innovation based on patents suffer from two main limitations. The first is a different propensity to patent across industries. This may lead to the overlooking of inventive efforts in sectors characterized by low patenting propensities. The second limitation is that patents differ greatly in their technological and economic significance. Innovation scholars have attempted to deal with this problem by weighting patents using renewal data or, for more recent periods, citations or other information such as claims, family size, etc. Still, it is recognized that these methods represent imperfect proxies of the quality of the invention underlying the patent in question.

More recently, therefore, there have been efforts of constructing innovation indicators on the basis of other sources such as technical journals, industrial exhibition catalogues, prizes and innovation awards, information from biographical dictionaries, etc. In many cases, the use of this type of indicators has been able to provide important new insights in the process of technical change, usefully complementing the use of patents.

The workshop will bring together a number of senior researchers from different European countries with expertise in the construction of innovation indicators using patents and other sources in order to discuss the most promising research directions in this field. At the same time the workshop will be open to PhD students who will have the opportunity of presenting their research projects and discussing it with both senior researchers and other fellow students.

Besides providing a feedback chance for ongoing PhD projects on historical innovation indicators, the aim of the workshop is also to foster cooperation in the construction of innovation indicators (both based on patents and on alternative sources) by economic historians. A session of the workshop will be devoted to the discussion of possibilities for exchange and sharing of databases (for example by constructing a historical data-hub on innovation indicators similar to those on “height” and “firms and capital markets” stored at the University of Tubingen) and methodological competences.

Advanced Seminars are open for PhD-students and Post-Docs. They will write and present a paper dealing with one or more core problems of their research. The paper should fall within the domain of the Seminar. The paper will be discussed by experts and other PhD-participants.

The workshop will be partially funded by the GLOBALEURONET ESF Research-Network and by the ESTER Graduate School

In addition the workshop will be open to about 10 PhD students or post-docs working on projects on historical innovation indicators. They will be selected by means of an open call. We have already received several expressions of interest from PhD students from different European countries (three from Sweden, two from Finland, one from UK, one from Norway, one from Belgium and one from Italy).