Patents, exhibitions and markets for innovation in the early 20th century: Evidence from Torino’s 1911 International Exhibition

Abstract: The present work expands on a recent strand of research, which has drawn attention on international exhibitions as an important element of the innovation scenario in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth, and on exhibits as a new valuable proxy for innovation. It outlines the main features of exhibition data and their differences from patent data; it advances a criterion to clean exhibition data from obviously non-innovative items; and it presents a new dataset referring to Torino’s 1911 International Exhibition, built according to that criterion. By joining and matching this source with Italian patent data, the paper provides an assessment of the extent to which exhibition data and patent data overlap, and analyses the choices of innovators between exhibiting and patenting, and the role of exhibitions as markets for new technologies. It is found that exhibiting and patenting did mostly occur separately, as exhibitions mainly worked as markets for innovative goods, while patents were mostly taken out by individuals and very often were not economically exploited. Yet, the presence is observed of a qualified niche of independent inventors, using the exhibition as a market for ideas, i.e. to advertise their findings to a selected public of potential investors, buyers or licensees. Moreover, in the industries related to mechanics and electricity, patenting and exhibiting were significantly more likely than in others to occur together, due to the relative ease of reverse-engineering.