La répartition des inventions dans l'industrie

Abstract

The Industrial Distribution of Invention What influences invention ? To what extent are the inventive efforts of men allocated in accordance with the ripeness of knowledge of various fields, to what extent in accordance with economic opportunités and pressures, and to what extent are they affected by a thousand of fortuitous factors ? The accumulated evidence of the author’s continuing research in this field suggests the general dominance of economical factors. It is the fact that inventions are intended for economic use that assures that economic considerations play a large and probably a dominant role in directing inventive effort. The author thinks that perhaps the best evidence on the course of inventive activity within individual industries consists of the author’s statistics, to be published later, of U.S. patents granted for many different industries. In brief, leaving random elements aside, the direction and volume of inventive effort appears to be jointly determined by the slate of knowledge and economic circumstances.