The first stage of innovation, Myhrvold says, was a golden era sparked by 1830s patent law changes that made the process of reviewing and granting patents much more rigorous. This reduced the likelihood that more than one patent would be granted on the same basic idea, making each patent much more valuable, and encouraging a parade of great lone inventors from Samuel Morse and George Westinghouse to Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. The parade continued into the early part of the 20th century with inventors like the Wright brothers, Bakelite creator Leo Baekeland, Polaroid founder Edwin H. Land and television pioneer Philo T. Farnsworth.

But by that time Myhrvold’s second stage, the era of corporate-controlled innovation, was already under way. At the turn of the century, companies such as General Electric, DuPont and AT&T began hiring scientists and engineers by the hundreds in an attempt to come up with more breakthroughs before outsiders could disrupt their monopolies. These companies’ labs kept the rights to new inventions to themselves, blanketed their fields with filings and overpowered the lone inventors with legal assaults. By the 1920s, corporations moved to gain a majority share of U.S. patents for the first time.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401437/the-invention-factory/