Event

Inventing Modern Invention: the Professionalization of Technological Progress in the US

30 January 2025
Expired!
6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
  • Attendance: online only
  • Language: EN

Event

Inventing Modern Invention: the Professionalization of Technological Progress in the US

Frank Neffke will be speaking in the Modelling Talks series, a series that brings together experts working on modeling physical, biological, and social phenomena, employing a variety of techniques such as differential equations, discrete-event simulations, and machine learning.

Meet: https://meet.google.com/niy-gtpk-sro

YouTube Stream: https://youtube.com/live/w9Pk-w8HaS0

Join the group to receive calendar invite: https://groups.google.com/a/modelingtalks.org/g/talks

Between the mid-19th and mid-20th century, the US transformed from an agricultural economy to the frontier in science, technology, and industry. We study how the US transitioned from traditional craftsmanship-based to today’s science-based innovation. We digitize half a million pages of patent yearbooks describing inventors, organizations, and technologies on over 1.6M patents to do so. We add demographic information from US census records and information on corporate research activities from large-scale repeated surveys on industrial research labs. Starting in 1920, the 19th-century craftsmanship-based invention was overtaken within just 20 years by a rapidly emerging system based on teamwork and a new specialist class of inventors, engineers. This new system relied on an organizational innovation: industrial research labs. These labs supported high-skill teamwork, replacing collaborations within families with professional ties in firms and industrial research labs. This shift had wide-ranging consequences. It not only altered the division of labor in invention, but also reshaped the geography of innovation, reestablishing large cities as epicenters of technological progress and introduced new barriers to patenting for women and foreign-born inventors.

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