Swedish historical patents

What role did inventions and inventors play in Sweden's development from a peripheral agricultural country to a leading industrial nation? Why and how are inventions created that can lead to industrial breakthroughs? How do markets for ideas, that disseminate new technology, arise and evolve?

Inventions, innovation, and knowledge transfer are all factors that research has shown to contribute to economic growth on an aggregated level. Swedish Historical Patents is an infrastructure with information and digitised records on approximately 122,000 Swedish patents granted between 1746-1945 and 87,000 patent holders and inventors. The infrastructure includes unique identifiers in the records, enabling to track the actors in innovation processes to an extent that was not possible previously.

The database has been developed by the Uppsala Patent History Research Group at the Department of Business Studies at Uppsala University in collaboration with the Swedish Intellectual Property Office (PRV) and researchers at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Helsinki University.