Actors in Innovation

Sammanfattning: Innovation is gospel today. This also means a surge in popularity for the agents behind innovation; innovators. But who are they, exactly? Anecdotal evidence from both recent times and historical settings tend to emphasize remarkable individuals, who more or less alone created amazing things. By utilizing the SWINNO-database of innovations, this thesis examines how empirically prevalent the narrative of the lone innovator is in the Swedish telecommunications sector. The material consists of cases of innovation from the period 1970-1990. The inventors behind the innovations are classified on account of their organizational circumstances, to see if independents are important contributors to Swedish innovation. The inquiry finds that the absolute majority of innovations are the fruits of firms and employees. They accounted for 84 % of all innovations, whilst the independents were behind 16 %. This inquiry also found that the share of innovations developed by independents was stable from the early to the later part of the period studied. This inquiry also tried to find out if the independents in the material were mostly "inventor-inventors" or "inventor-entrepreneur" types. The results showed the latter is more common and has become increasingly so over time.