Accounting for market innovation: The pioneering Cruto's lamp and the entrepreneurial logic of stakeholder engagement

Introduction: This paper explores the relationship between public communication, accounting, and entrepreneurial legitimisation by examining how Alessandro Cruto, the Italian inventor of the incandescent lamp, engaged with stakeholders through the press in the late nineteenth century. Aims of the work: The study aims to show how Cruto's newspaper-based communication contributed to the construction of social and relational capital, anticipating early forms of accountability, stakeholder engagement, and dialogic accounting in the context of technological innovation. Methodological approach: Drawing on New Accounting History, the paper adopts a qualitative historical approach combining microhistory and inverse prosopography. It analyses nineteenth-century newspaper articles and archival sources to reconstruct Cruto's interactions with different stakeholder groups. Main findings: The findings identify three main mechanisms through which Cruto built legitimacy and relational capital: technical transparency and public testing of innovation; institutional, commercial, and civic legitimisation; and bidirectional dialogue with stakeholders through public clarifications, responses, and corrections in the press. Contribution to the literature: The paper contributes to accounting history by repositioning Cruto as a proto-entrepreneur and showing how practices resembling dialogic accountability and stakeholder engagement emerged before their formal theorisation. It also offers a methodological contribution by combining microhistory and inverse prosopography within the New Accounting History framework.