The European Advantage

Submitted by David Ryan (United States), Mar 28, 2022 at 22:39

My opinion is that the modern European advantage came from the single innovation from the 1600s forward of the incentive of vesting for some period the material advantage of innovation in the innovator, instead of in the state or not at all; patent protection. Invention built on invention, with the patent time limit making further innovation an imperative. Patents also eliminated the need for secrecy to profit from innovation. A thing only needed to be invented once to add to the public knowledge. Patents worked so well, everyone else was temporarily left in the dust.

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