Innovation

This chapter addresses how guilds dealt with technological innovation. Innovation is a final sphere in which market failures are widespread in premodern economies, as in modern ones. On the one hand, contemporaries frequently complained that guilds blocked new techniques and practices. On the other hand, guilds were in a position to generate cartel rents, and this might have encouraged their members to incur the costs of invention. Guilds might also have encouraged diffusion of technological knowledge through compulsory apprenticeship, mandatory travelling by journeymen, or the spatial clustering of practitioners. Guilds could also affect innovation unintentionally by things they did for other reasons. Guilds thus provide a rich context for investigating the role of different institutional mechanisms in encouraging the invention and diffusion of innovations.