"Making business of business machines, Norwegian entrepreneurs and IBM in the late 1920s"

Inventors and entrepreneurs far off the office machine industrial epicenters of USA and Germany were early capable of reinventing technologies of the office machine industry in ways that foresaw the electronic machines of the computer age. In 1922, an inventor teamed up with a business entrepreneur in Oslo, Norway to find an industrial partner with the muscles needed to make a patented calculating machine into a profitable product. They ended up in New York in the late 1920s where they approached probable partners like Burroughs, Remington Rand, NCR and IBM in addition to bankers and investors. Hitherto unknown documents give a new example of an inventor trying to make it in New York with what he considered a brilliant invention and business plan. A surprising interest shown from IBM to the Norwegians tells an unknown tale.
This case shows opportunities offered and methods followed to make it possible for entrepreneurs from the periphery to sell new technologies to leading industries in the USA. The paper will discuss the power relations in such processes and how the marked for patents and new technologies worked, beyond the patent applications and over in active campaigns to make business from inventions.