THE MOBILITY OF TECHNOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE THROUGH PATENT SYSTEM. HEURISTIC POSSIBILITIES IN MEXICAN PATENTS, 1832-1911

Abstract

This article examines the patent system as a channel that has favored the disclosure and displacement of technological knowledge through various geographical scales, from its origins in the late eighteenth century. Thanks to a set of essential principles, the patent system has been configured as a formal institution that drives the mobility of knowledge that is the essence of patented inventions. In the same way, the historical process that led, gradually, to the adoption of these nodal principles in the Mexican patent system is analyzed. Finally, based on information from Mexican patents, the type of information that can be found in the patent files is described, in order to present the multiple data and evidence that can be extracted from this documentary source to study the events of mobility of technological knowledge. All this with the general purpose of showing that, historically, patent systems have been an excellent instrument for coding, sharing and displacing knowledge, as well as a great source of information that, at present, offers us multiple heuristic possibilities for researchers to reconstruct that history of the mobilization of technological knowledge.