EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Evolution of Technologies: An Assessment of the State-of-the-Art

Giovanni Dosi and Richard Nelson (rrn2@columbia.edu)

Eurasian Business Review, 2013, vol. 3, issue 1, 3-46

Abstract: Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines who have studied technological advance in some detail have converged on the proposition that technological advance needs to be understood as proceeding through an evolutionary process characterized by multiple search efforts, deep intertechnological differences in the ways potential opportunities are tagged, ubiquitous uncertainty and innovation-driven competition among firms. In this work we survey the state-of-the-art in the analysis of such evolutionary processes. We start by asking whether there are some invariances in the knowledge structure and in the ways technological knowledge accumulates and, together, what distinguishes different fields and different periods of technological advance, if any. Next we address (i) the differences across paradigms in terms of nature and sources of innovative opportunities; (ii) the mechanisms of appropriation of economic returns from innovative activities; (iii) the role of demand and other socio-economic factors in shaping the directions of technological advances; (iv) the possibility of identifying discrete families sectors, distinct according to their sources of innovative knowledge and modes of innovating; (v) the relationships between the nature of productive knowledge and the distribution of input coefficients across firms; (vi) the patterns of innovation diffusion; and, finally, (vii) we discuss the role of history in the evolution of technologies, that is their path-dependence. Copyright Eurasia Business and Economics Society 2013

Keywords: Innovation; Evolution; Technological Paradigms; Trajectories; Appropriability; Opportunity; Innovation Diffusion; Technological Taxonomies; Path-Dependence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (85)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.14208/BF03353816 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurasi:v:3:y:2013:i:1:p:3-46

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40821

DOI: 10.14208/BF03353816

Access Statistics for this article

Eurasian Business Review is currently edited by Marco Vivarelli

More articles in Eurasian Business Review from Springer, Eurasia Business and Economics Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla (sonal.shukla@springer.com) and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (indexing@springernature.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-29
Handle: RePEc:spr:eurasi:v:3:y:2013:i:1:p:3-46