Economics of innovation / edited by Christopher Freeman

Interest in the economics of innovation has been growing very rapidly in the 1980s. Whereas Schumpeter stood almost alone in the first half of the century, there has been a renewed burst of empirical and theoretical analysis in the most recent period. This selection of the seminal papers published in the 1980s starts with Schumpeterian theory but goes beyond his pioneering formulations. About half of the papers were originally published in leading journals of economics but the other half were published in journals dealing with policies for science and technology as this is an area where technology and economics meet. Whereas in the 1960s most of the literature was published in the United States, in the most recent period European economists have made a major contribution. This is reflected in the selection of papers which cover all the recent major developments including evolutionary theory, strategies of firms, path dependency, diffusion of innovations and paradigm change.