Forms of innovation throughout time: insights from the British business elite

Abstract

Widening the scope to all forms of innovation and paying more attention to the service sector are some of the remaining challenges of innovation studies. The standard innovation indicators are not useful to deal with them, so other alternatives must be explored. Based on a prosopographic approach, we have constructed an ad hoc data set of significant innovations developed by the top two hundred British business leaders/firms active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We have considered innovation in the wide Schumpeterian sense and included patented and non-patented as well as domestic and imported innovations. The main results are: that most innovations (63%) were not patented; that product innovations increased their relative importance compared to process ones up to 1920, the contrary happening afterwards; that in the long run the most ‘traditional’ Schumpeterian forms of innovation (the finding of new markets and new sources of supply) lost weight in favour of the most ‘modern’ ones (organisational and marketing innovations); that the innovations appeared in clusters over time; that the service industry showed greater innovative dynamism than manufacturing; and that the British business elite maintained a very low technological dependence over time.