In this paper, we use both patents’ individual life span and foreign patenting activities in Germany to identify the most valuable patents of the 21 most innovative countries (except for Germany) from the European Core, the European periphery and overseas between 1877 and 1932. Our empirical...

Introducing the concept of innovation capital we will analyse conditions under which a national industry is able to succeed in international Schumpeterian competition. Then we will discuss the significance of this concept for the economic development of the German plastics industry from the...

We use a newly developed data set of 39,343 high-value patents granted between 1877 and 1918 to demonstrate that technological progress during German industrialization occurred in at least four different technological waves. We distinguish the railway wave (187786), the dye wave (188796), the...