This article falls under studies in the history of technology revising inherited patterns of growth analysis during the first industrial revolution. How can we understand inventive activity out of the challenge and response model and out of mythologies of invention? Which skills, which intellectual and material means were required for technical creativity? The answers are epistemological; they are based on a technical approach of technical objects considering their design, their uses and their functionality. In this perspective, invention appears to be a process based upon synthesis (combining, borrowing, imitation, substituting). In this way, relationships between technical culture and abilities to exchange are the main point of invention. Which are the historical forms of this process? This article, examining the business of an 18th century merchant from Lyon in the East, is first questioning how trade practices and merchant culture could foster invention and second, how markets for knowledge developed within networks of innovative and competitive enterprises.