Technology transfer and domestic innovation: evidence from a new dataset of Italian inventors, 1855–1914

Abstract This paper studies the relationship between the exposure of Italian inventors to foreign technologies and the quality of their inventions from the Unification (1861) to WWI. The paper relies on two complementary individual-level datasets: The first dataset comprises all the more than 131,000 patents registered in Italy between 1855 and 1914 as presented in Martinez, Nuvolari and Vasta 2025, mimeo. The second dataset contains biographical information about notable inventors and thus allows to obtain both technology- and inventor-based measures of the quality of inventions. The findings indicate that the direct exposure to foreign technologies improved the quality of patents, but the benefits were not substantial. While exposure to technologically similar patents from France and Great Britain led to an improvement in the quality of patents, exposure to more technologically distant patents from Germany did not. These findings suggest that Italian inventors benefitted from the exposure to foreign technologies to a limited extent.