Minority Migrations and the Diffusion of Technology1

Warren C. Scoville

The Journal of Economic History, 1951, vol. 11, issue 4, 347-360

Abstract: The process of technical change from the economist's viewpoint may be broken down into three phases: invention, innovation, and diffusion. Invention, or the increase in technological possibilities, is the discovery or perception of new configurations of technical processes or principles that alter the array of possible production functions. An innovation consists of using any given production function for the “first” time. Diffusion is basically imitative and involves the gradual replacement of old methods by the new. One example will suffice to illustrate these distinctions. The invention of the automatic bottle machine consisted of the conception, experimentation, and model-building activities of Michael J. Owens; the pioneering efforts of the entrepreneurs at Toledo, Ohio, to demonstrate that the new production function was both practical and economically feasible constituted the innovational phase; and the gradual replacement of hand-blown and semiautomatic machine methods by the new process in both American and foreign markets involved diffusion.

Date: 1951
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

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:cup:jechis:v:11:y:1951:i:04:p:347-360_08

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Journal of Economic History from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().