Group Of Inventors Research Articles

“Food Is History of the Deepest Kind”: Eating and Utopia in Sloan's Sourdough and Sargent's “The American Cockaigne”

This article examines Lyman Sargent's article “The American Cockaigne” alongside the 2017 novel Sourdough by Robin Sloan. Both Sargent and Sloan examine modern approaches to food and utopianism that build on earlier Cockaigne tales—medieval “peasant utopias” imagining abundant magical foods and satisfying laziness. Sargent contends that similar stories remained prevalent in America among socially marginalized groups. Sourdough imagines how a group of inventors might create a utopian community by blending food traditions with innovative technologies. Both Sargent and Sloan suggest that Cockaigne stories and their later antecedents should be seen as part of the utopian tradition and that visions of unusual foods demonstrate the importance of social communities.

Benefiting colleagues but not the city: Localized effects from the relocation of superstar inventors

In this paper I examine episodes in which superstar inventors relocate to a new city. In particular, in order to assess whether the beneficial effects of physical proximity to a superstar have a restricted network dimension or a wider spatial breadth (spillovers), I estimate changes in patterns of patenting activity following these events for two different groups of inventors: the superstar's close collaborators, and all the other inventors in a given urban area, for both the locality where the superstar moves to and for the one that is left behind. In the case of collaborators, I restrict the attention to patents realized independently from the superstar. The results from the event study register a large and persistent positive effect on the collaborators in the city of destination, as well as a simultaneous negative trend affecting those still residing in the previous location. In the long run, these effects translate into an increased difference between the two groups of about 0.16 patents per inventor. Conversely, no city-wide spillover effect can be attested, offering little support to place-based policies aimed at inducing a positive influx of top innovators in urban areas.

Geographical dynamics of knowledge flows: descriptive statistics on inventor network distance and patent citation graphs in the pharmaceutical industry

In the knowledge-based geography of innovation literature, there are two opposing claims on the spatio-temporal pattern in knowledge flows over a technological trajectory. Firstly, after the breakthrough, externalities stimulate agglomeration of specialised firms and thus cause incremental inventions to take place progressively localised. Secondly, after the breakthrough, progressive codification and technological crystallisation facilitates collaboration over greater distances. In this study, forward citation graphs of breakthrough patents are constructed and enriched with locations of inventors. Using these citation graphs, we study claims on co-inventor distances and distances of groups of inventors across citations. We find support for existing claims and alternative spatio-temporal patterns. Notably that, early on in trajectories, inventors generally collaborate mostly locally, yet cite knowledge sources found more remotely. Later on, inventors collaborate over greater distances, yet cite more local sources. Conclusively, there is progressive globalisation of inventor networks, whereby inventors increasingly use local sources in follow-up inventions.

Rewards for Patents and Inventor Behaviors in Industrial Research and Development

This study investigates the effects of rewards in a research and development (R&D) setting in which employees’ inventive efforts lead to patented inventions. Pay for performance (PFP) for inventions is associated with two challenges: Low-quality inventions may be rewarded (false positives), and high-quality inventions may be overlooked (false negatives). Building on previous findings regarding the motivational and informational effects of rewards, we use social identity theory to predict that different types of inventors react differently to such false positive and false negative information. Specifically, we hypothesize that PFP that produces false positives has detrimental effects on corporate inventors with a taste for science, who are motivated by scientific prestige, reputation, and intellectual curiosity. The empirical results from survey data related to 3,995 inventor–patent pairs show that, for this particular group of inventors, false positives are associated with reduced effort in research activ...

Disruptive Innovation in Laboratory Medicine

Over the last 5 decades, laboratory medicine has witnessed a remarkable wave of innovations that transformed the field from a peripheral to a central player in healthcare delivery. These advances enabled the introduction and performance of new tests on a large scale, some in a decentralized setting, in an accurate and a precise manner, thus leading to better diagnosis, more accurate prediction of disease prognosis, and improved patient management. This evolution was the result of both sustaining and disruptive innovation, the latter being a new concept, technology, product, or process that is at first inferior to an existing one but with time it improves, becomes superior to it, and eventually replaces it. Some examples of disruptive innovation in laboratory medicine include continuous flow analysis, dry reagents on dipsticks, pregnancy home testing, PCR, point-of-care testing, and use of MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry for pathogen identification. Although sustaining innovation steadily drives progress, paradigm shifts usually occur only with disruptive thinking. With the escalating cost of healthcare and the prediction that it will soon reach 20% of the annual GDP in the US, bold measures and disruptive approaches in delivering effective and economical clinical laboratory testing are more needed than ever. In this Q&A, a group of inventors, entrepreneurs, and cutting-edge scientists share their views on sustaining and disruptive innovation in laboratory medicine. Describe briefly the core technology or concept of your innovation. Eric Topol: Smartphones as the hub of medicine going forward, capable of performing routine laboratories (with suitable hardware additions), real-time, real-world biosensor data of most physiologic metrics, capability of doing a substantial part of the physical examination, and ultimately, assembly of a virtual medical assistant to process these multilayered medical data for each individual. All of this data collection and analytics would be supported by cloud computing and validated algorithms. Image Courtesy of XPRIZE Eugene …

<span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">L’Europe de Gutenberg: Le livre et l’invention de la modernité occidentale</span> (review)

Reviewed by: L’Europe de Gutenberg: Le livre et l’invention de la modernité occidentale Jim Chevallier L’Europe de Gutenberg: Le livre et l’invention de la modernité occidentale. By Frédéric Barbier. Paris: Belin, 2006. 365 pp. € 25,00 (paper). ISBN 978-2701142036. Today the ubiquity of the printed word—on cards, cups, T-shirts, well beyond the sphere of literature—seems almost like that of grass or leaves, a natural phenomenon. And yet mass printing and the social, political, and other developments resulting from it have all grown from the work of one man, working in the midvalley of the Rhine within a few short years: “To the degree that we can reconstitute the facts, Gutenberg . . . began to print in Mainz, starting in 1449” (136); “printing was born in the valley of the middle Rhine, in Mainz or in Strasbourg” (192). (All translations are the reviewer’s.) In his new book on the impact of this development, Frédéric Barbier shows that before Gutenberg’s invention text was reproduced only in conjunction with images by means (such as xylography) that allowed only minimal diffusion of brief text, even if “the decisive invention [was] in the air, to use Henri Jean Martin’s fine expression. . . . Groups of inventors and entrepreneurs [were] working on technical problems of all sorts, papermaking, fabricating mirrors, polishing precious stones, techniques of firearms, improvement in the stamping of bindings, and the search for a new method of multiplying texts” (118). After tracing how the importance of the written word grew in Europe along with cities and, with them, universities, how books moved from monasteries to the marketplace, and how, toward the end of the eleventh century, paper finally made its way from China to Europe, Barbier narrows the focus to technical innovation as he approaches the decisive point in this story. “Despite all that has been said, the person responsible for the invention of typography in moving type can by right be identified as the Mainzer Johann (or Henne) Genfleisch zur Laden, called Gutenberg, from the name of the house where he was born (Zum guten Berge—at the good mountain) in Mainz, between 1394 and 1400” (123). Political events drove the adult Gutenberg to Strasbourg, and so Mainz must share the glory of its native son’s invention with that city, where he seems to have done his first experiments and found his first investors. In retelling Gutenberg’s well-known tale, Barbier highlights its echoes of corresponding developments in today’s Internet world and compares the German concept of Aventur with the modern idea of research and development funded by venture capitalists: “In Avignon as in Strasbourg and later in Mainz, the perfection of a new technique is [End Page 242] financed without knowing if the research and the trials will ever produce a result” (131)—much as with today’s startups, Barbier says (lest the point be missed). (He later refers to presses as “hardware” and the text necessary for their output as “software” and calls the valley of the Rhine “paper valley”; such comparisons, far from seeming forced or self-consciously “relevant,” are convincing, not least because he uses them sparingly.) Certainly, Gutenberg’s own story is more that of an innovative entrepreneur than of any one “eureka” moment. Along with stuttering technical progress came mundane business matters: rifts with partners and lawsuits. Gutenberg’s business savvy was also reflected in the lighter but salable works he produced while perfecting the technique that would finally allow him to show, in 1454, samples of a decisive proof-of-concept: the forty-two-line Bible. Both the market and the trade immediately recognized the revolutionary nature of this new technology; orders for the Bible (years in the actual making) poured in, and the technique used to produce it was soon adapted in neighboring areas before Paris, Venice, and other major cities finally became the chief centers of printing. Still, the larger point of Barbier’s tale—densely and energetically told—is the impact this innovation had not only on the very idea of what made up a book but also on far wider spheres. Though the first printed books largely...

From Print to Patents: Living on Instruments in Early Modern Europe

Surprisingly, patents are nowhere as central to the history of scientific instruments as they are to the history of technology. It will take much archival work to fill such an historiographical gap. My goal here is substantially more modest: to outline some patterns and chronological trends emerging from a comparison of printed patent rolls up to 1800 (which I am making available electronically) and other tactics used by instrument makers and designers to protect their businesses and authorship. My definition of instrument is capacious. I consider mathematical, optical, and philosophical instruments, but also include evidence about clocks, calculating machines, globes, and maps. Defining ‘patent’ and ‘inventor’ within the chronological and geographical boundaries of this study is, however, a more difficult matter. Not only are modern patents profoundly different from early modern privileges (which are nevertheless customarily referred to as “patents” in anglophone literature), but the role and form of privileges underwent changes in the 1500–1800 period discussed here. For simplicity’s sake, I use the terms ‘privilege’ and ‘patent’ interchangeably while also highlighting the differences between modern intellectual property and early modern privileges whenever relevant. I take a similarly pragmatic approach to the definition of inventor, which I equate to that of patent-holder while specifying, when important, whether that person was a designer or a producer, a maker or an investor, or whether inventorship was individual or multiple. Early modern mathematical and natural philosophical texts were usually assigned to one single author (whose shadow may have erased other technicians and contributors), but we will see that it was not uncommon for instrument patents to be shared by a group of inventors, each bringing different skills and resources. Multi-inventorship, it seems, predates multi-authorship. A question informing much of this essay concerns what the use of patents and other forms of protection can tell us about the early instrument makers’ and designers’ evolving markets, business practices, international mobility, relations with craft guilds, and changing sense of property in their instruments. A second question concerns the changing nature of the credit attached to instrument making and design. Instruments sit uneasily between the two main early modern systems of credit: one based on priority and publication (rewarded with symbolic, “philosophical” credit), and one based on the exchange of objects or labour for money. Many instruments were sold, but others — like Galileo’s telescope or Tycho’s apparatus — remained proprietary and often tightly guarded. They gained credit for their makers through

Whatever Happened to Synectics?

The article brings the story of the Synectics creative problem‐solving techniques (originating in 1960) up to date. It identifies its origins with a group of inventors, who tape‐recorded their meetings to research their creative process, and the resulting benefits and weaknesses. Synectics today is a set of process tools which can be used successfully in a variety of situations, either in a specific sequence (as in the original invention model) or individually according to the needs of the situation. The result is a variety of meeting models and techniques for enhancing personal effectiveness

The evolution of the radio aerial

The concept of the radio aerial evolved empirically from the experiments of a varied group of inventors - in particular Loomis, Dolbear, Tesla, Marconi and Jackson - with Marconi acting as the catalyst that combined their efforts into a practicable system.