The Democratization of Invention

The Democratization of Invention PDF

Author: B. Zorina Khan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-09-12

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9780521811354

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This book, first published in 2005, examines the evolution and impact of American intellectual property rights during the 'long nineteenth century'.

Democratizing Innovation

Democratizing Innovation PDF

Author: Eric Von Hippel

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2006-02-17

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0262250179

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The process of user-centered innovation: how it can benefit both users and manufacturers and how its emergence will bring changes in business models and in public policy. Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all.The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products—most notably in the free and open-source software movement—but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive. Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses—the custom semiconductor industry is one example—that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.

FabLab

FabLab PDF

Author: Julia Walter-Herrmann

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2014-03-31

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 3839423821

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Ten years after the first FabLab (a so called fabrication laboratory) was opened at MIT, more than 120 FabLabs exist all over the world. Today, it is time to look back at a decade of FabLab activities. This book shows how small production devices, such as laser cutters and 3D printers, and dedicated educationists, researchers and FabLab practitioners transform the fields of learning, work, production, design, maker culture, law and science on a global scale. In this composition experts from various countries, such as Germany, India or the USA, and distinguished academic institutions, such as MIT or Stanford University, discuss theoretical questions and introduce practical approaches concerning FabLab activities.

The Battle over Patents

The Battle over Patents PDF

Author: Stephen H. Haber

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-08-06

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0197576184

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An examination of how the patent system works, imperfections and all, to incentivize innovation Do patents facilitate or frustrate innovation? Lawyers, economists, and politicians who have staked out strong positions in this debate often attempt to validate their claims by invoking the historical record--but they frequently get the history wrong. The Battle over Patents gets it right. Bringing together thoroughly researched essays from prominent historians and social scientists, this volume traces the long and contentious history of patents and examines how they have worked in practice. Editors Stephen H. Haber and Naomi R. Lamoreaux show that patent systems are the result of contending interests at different points in production chains battling over economic surplus. The larger the potential surplus, the more extreme are the efforts of contending parties-now and in the past-to search out, generate, and exploit any and all sources of friction. Patent systems, as human creations, are therefore necessarily ridden with imperfections. This volume explores these shortcomings and explains why, despite all the debate, historically US-style patent systems still dominate all other methods of encouraging inventive activity.

Inventing the Industrial Revolution

Inventing the Industrial Revolution PDF

Author: Christine MacLeod

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-05-09

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780521893992

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This book examines the development of the English patent system and its relationship with technical change during the period between 1660 and 1800, when the patent system evolved from an instrument of royal patronage into one of commercial competition among the inventors and manufacturers of the Industrial Revolution. It analyses the legal and political framework within which patenting took place and gives an account of the motivations and fortunes of patentees, who obtained patents for a variety of purposes beyond the simple protection of an invention. It includes the first in-depth attempt to gauge the reliability of the patent statistics as a measure of inventive activity and technical change in the early part of the Industrial Revolution, and suggests that the distribution of patents is a better guide to the advance of capitalism than to the centres of inventive activity. It also queries the common assumption that the chief goal of inventors was to save labour, and examines contemporary criticism of the patent system in the light of the changing conceptualisation of invention among natural scientists and political economists.

The Political Invention of Fragile States

The Political Invention of Fragile States PDF

Author: Sonja Grimm

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-14

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 1317625455

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This book investigates the emergence, the dissemination and the reception of the notion of ‘state fragility’. It analyses the process of conceptualisation, examining how the ‘fragile states’ concept was framed by policy makers to describe reality in accordance with their priorities in the fields of development and security. Contributors investigate the instrumental use of the ‘state fragility’ label in the legitimisation of Western policy interventions in countries facing violence and profound poverty. They also emphasise the agency of actors ‘on the receiving end’, describing how the elites and governments in so-called ‘fragile states’ have incorporated and reinterpreted the concept to fit their own political agendas. A first set of articles examines the role played by the World Bank, the OECD, the European Union and the G7+ in the transnational diffusion of the concept, which is understood as a critical element in the new discourse on international aid and security. A second set of papers employs three case studies (Sudan, Indonesia and Uganda) to explore the processes of appropriation, reinterpretation and the strategic use of the ‘fragile state’ concept. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

The Origins of Democratic Thinking

The Origins of Democratic Thinking PDF

Author: Cynthia Farrar

Publisher: CUP Archive

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780521375849

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Dr Farrar argues that the development of political theory accompanied the growth of democracy at Athens in the fifth century BC. By analysing the writings of Protagoras, Thucydides and Democritus in the context of political developments and speculation about the universe, she reveals the existence of a distinctive approach to the characterisation of democratic order, and in doing so demonstrates the virtues of Thucydides' historical conception of politics.

Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age

Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age PDF

Author: Kurt W. Beyer

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2012-02-10

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 0262517264

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The career of computer visionary Grace Murray Hopper, whose innovative work in programming laid the foundations for the user-friendliness of today's personal computers that sparked the information age. A Hollywood biopic about the life of computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992) would go like this: a young professor abandons the ivy-covered walls of academia to serve her country in the Navy after Pearl Harbor and finds herself on the front lines of the computer revolution. She works hard to succeed in the all-male computer industry, is almost brought down by personal problems but survives them, and ends her career as a celebrated elder stateswoman of computing, a heroine to thousands, hailed as the inventor of computer programming. Throughout Hopper's later years, the popular media told this simplified version of her life story. In Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, Kurt Beyer reveals a more authentic Hopper, a vibrant and complex woman whose career paralleled the meteoric trajectory of the postwar computer industry. Both rebellious and collaborative, Hopper was influential in male-dominated military and business organizations at a time when women were encouraged to devote themselves to housework and childbearing. Hopper's greatest technical achievement was to create the tools that would allow humans to communicate with computers in terms other than ones and zeroes. This advance influenced all future programming and software design and laid the foundation for the development of user-friendly personal computers.