Maybe my Google searching abilities are lacking, but I'm having trouble finding an answer to this; did the pre-IR world have roughly the same number (rate over time) of inventions as the post-IR world? Obviously, there isn't an exact number, but from everything I've seen/read, historians say the IR caused an increase in technological innovations. On the other hand, I can't imagine that ancient peoples weren't constantly coming up with inventions or new ways of doing things.
Just updating this in case anyone stumbles across it in the future. I was able to do some more research (not much, there's not too much info available) and it seems that the IR did cause an increase in invention rate, but that's not to say that inventions didn't happen before. Metal working, improved farming techniques, parchment, shipbuilding, etc are all things that were constantly invented/improved/tweaked in the pre-IR world. We just take most of those things for granted (wheat, corn, paper) so we tend to not think of them as advancements.