IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/auu/hpaper/133.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Prizes and Patents: Female Innovation in Colonial Australia

Author

Listed:
  • Grant Fleming
  • Frank Liu
  • David Merrett
  • Simon Ville

Abstract

We analyse prize winners at international exhibitions held in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century as a means of estimating the significance of female inventors. It provides an alternative measure from the more common focus on patents. While both methodologies – patents and exhibitions – have shortcomings, exhibitions appear to be more inclusive of sectors in which female inventiveness was concentrated including apparel, textiles and the creative arts. This is confirmed by the larger share of women inventors as exhibition prize-winners compared with patentees. Female patentees and prize-winners possessed similar characteristics – many were married, lived locally, and were occasional and individualist in their creative habits.

Suggested Citation

  • Grant Fleming & Frank Liu & David Merrett & Simon Ville, 2025. "Prizes and Patents: Female Innovation in Colonial Australia," CEH Discussion Papers 07, Centre for Economic History, Research School of Economics, Australian National University.
    • Handle: RePEc:auu:hpaper:133
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cbe.anu.edu.au/researchpapers/CEH/WP202507.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Petra Moser & Tom Nicholas, 2013. "Prizes, Publicity and Patents: Non-Monetary Awards as a Mechanism to Encourage Innovation," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 61(3), pages 763-788, September.
    2. Liam Brunt & Josh Lerner & Tom Nicholas, 2012. "Inducement Prizes and Innovation," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 60(4), pages 657-696, December.
    3. Zvi Griliches, 1998. "R&D and Productivity: The Econometric Evidence," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number gril98-1, March.
    4. Khan, B. Zorina, 2013. "Selling Ideas: An International Perspective on Patenting and Markets for Technological Innovations, 1790–1930," Business History Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 87(1), pages 39-68, April.
    5. Khan, B. Zorina, 2016. "Invisible Women: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Family Firms in Nineteenth-Century France," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 76(1), pages 163-195, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Liotard, Isabelle & Revest, Valérie, 2018. "Contests as innovation policy instruments: Lessons from the US federal agencies' experience," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 127(C), pages 57-69.
    2. Jana Gallus & Bruno S. Frey, 2016. "Awards: A strategic management perspective," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(8), pages 1699-1714, August.
    3. Brueggemann, Julia & Meub, Lukas, 2015. "Experimental evidence on the effects of innovation contests," University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics 251, University of Goettingen, Department of Economics.
    4. Alexander M Danzer & Natalia Danzer & Carsten Feuerbaum, 2024. "Military spending and innovation: learning from 19th-century world fair exhibition data," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 33(4), pages 831-854.
    5. Stephen D Billington & Alan J Hanna, 2021. "That’s classified! Inventing a new patent taxonomy [Text matching to measure patent similarity]," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 30(3), pages 678-705.
    6. Arnault Morisson & Isabelle Liotard & Valérie Revest, 2023. "Small Wins through Inducement Prizes: Introducing Challenge-Oriented Regional Prizes (CORP)," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(4), pages 1-14, February.
    7. Li, Yunjian & Chen, Jiawen & Li, Li & Huang, Xiaojun, 2024. "Government innovation awards, innovation funds acquisition and enterprise innovation," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 846-864.
    8. Bruno S Frey & Jana Gallus, 2016. "Honors: A rational choice analysis of award bestowals," Rationality and Society, , vol. 28(3), pages 255-269, August.
    9. Alexander Donges & Felix Selgert, 2019. "Technology transfer via foreign patents in Germany, 1843–77," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 72(1), pages 182-208, February.
    10. Grant Fleming & Frank Liu & David Merrett & Simon Ville, 2022. "Australian Innovative Activity and Offshore Technology 1904 – 2016," CEH Discussion Papers 09, Centre for Economic History, Research School of Economics, Australian National University.
    11. Burton, M. Diane & Nicholas, Tom, 2017. "Prizes, patents and the search for longitude," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 21-36.
    12. Grant Fleming & Frank Liu & David Merrett & Simon Ville, 2025. "Creative Types: Inventive Women in Colonial Australia," CEH Discussion Papers 06, Centre for Economic History, Research School of Economics, Australian National University.
    13. Justice A. Tambo, 2018. "Recognizing farmer-generated innovations through contests: insights from four African countries," Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food, Springer;The International Society for Plant Pathology, vol. 10(5), pages 1237-1250, October.
    14. B. Zorina Khan, 2024. "‘A new way by her invented’: Women inventors and technological innovation in Britain, 1800–1930," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 77(3), pages 928-952, August.
    15. Nuvolari, Alessandro & Tortorici, Gaspare & Vasta, Michelangelo, 2023. "British-French Technology Transfer from the Revolution to Louis Philippe (1791–1844): Evidence from Patent Data," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 83(3), pages 833-873, September.
    16. Valeria Costantini & Francesco Crespi & Giovanni Marin & Elena Paglialunga, 2016. "Eco-innovation, sustainable supply chains and environmental performance in European industries," LEM Papers Series 2016/19, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy.
    17. Kumar, Sanjesh & Singh, Baljeet, 2019. "Barriers to the international diffusion of technological innovations," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 74-86.
    18. Georgios Gioldasis & Antonio Musolesi & Michel Simioni, 2020. "Model uncertainty, nonlinearities and out-of-sample comparison: evidence from international technology diffusion," Working Papers hal-02790523, HAL.
    19. Ayhan, Fatih & Elal, Onuray, 2023. "The IMPACTS of technological change on employment: Evidence from OECD countries with panel data analysis," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 190(C).
    20. Lamberova, Natalia, 2021. "The puzzling politics of R&D: Signaling competence through risky projects," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(3), pages 801-818.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:auu:hpaper:133. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/chanuau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.