The Economics of Innovation

Technical innovations and organizational innovations are of major importance for the competitive performance of firms and of nations and for the long term growth of the world economy. This area of economics has been subjected to an explosion of theoretical and empirical research during the last 30 years by economists in the United States and more recently their colleagues in Europe and Japan. This volume focuses attention on the most significant advances both in theoretical and empirical work published in leading journals of economics as well as in journals dealing with policies for science and technology. It covers all the major developments including evolutionary theory, strategies of firms, path dependency, diffusion of innovations and paradigm change.