Decline of the Independent Inventor: A Schumpterian Story?

Joseph Schumpeter argued in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that the rise of large firms’ investments in in-house R&D spelled the doom of the entrepreneurial innovator. The authors explore this idea by analyzing the career patterns of successive cohorts of highly productive inventors from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They find that over time highly productive inventors were increasingly likely to form long-term attachments with firms.