Evolutionary economics badly needs a behavioral theory of household consumption behavior, but to date only limited progress has been made on that front. Partly because Schumpeter's own writings were ...focused there, and partly because this has been the focus of most of the more recent empirical work on technological change, modern evolutionary economists have focused on the “supply side”. However, because a significant portion of the innovation going on in capitalist countries has been in the form of new consumer goods and services, it should be obvious that dealing coherently with the Schumpeterian agenda requires a theory which treats in a realistic way how consumers respond to new goods and services. The purpose of this essay is to map out a broad alternative to the neoclassical theory of consumer behavior.
This paper analyzes the long‐term transformations of the occupational structure in 50 provinces of Spain with a view to ascertain the existence and assess the extent of employment polarization. The ...peculiar characteristics of this country, namely rigid labor markets and the relatively recent transition to democracy, make for an interesting addition to existing studies on this topic. In line with previous literature on other countries, we find a strong association between the decline of “routine” mid‐skill jobs and the expansion of low‐skill service employment as well as differential labor market outcomes by levels of formal education. Results are robust to various controls and instrumental variables that account for long‐term industry specialization. We also find a positive local multiplier effect of high‐skilled workers on the demand for nontradable service jobs.
This paper presents a longitudinal study on the evolution of the retail banking sector in the UK following the adoption of automated payments in the 1970s. The analysis is cast in the context of ...innovation studies and articulates how changing configurations of the knowledge base combined with the emergence and adaptation of institutional structures stirred a paradigm of service innovation in an information-intensive industry like banking. The cases of the Automated Teller Machine (ATM) and of the Electronic Fund Transfer at Point of Sale (EFTPOS) provide evidence on the subtleties of a dual evolutionary process underpinning the development of a system of innovation: the growing ecology of actors and the emergence of new forms of coordination across them.
The objective of this paper is to propose a multidisciplinary approach for the analysis of demand and innovation. It combines insights from studies on technology diffusion, evolutionary economics and ...cognitive psychology to argue that consumption and demand are learning processes driven by trial-and-error, rather than by ex-ante maximisation. The paper presents a heuristic synthesis to incorporate learning processes in the determination of consumption preferences and capabilities. The case of banking service innovation in the UK is presented as an illustrative example of the outlined dynamics.
•Focus on the conversion and formalisation of novel practices within existing firm and industry.•Analyses knowledge systematisation and reconfiguration involved in design routines.•Development of a ...firm's business function stemming from diverse sets of knowledge.•Understanding of the interplay across individual skills, routines, and changing firm and industry organisation.•Institutional dimension incorporated to analysis of firm-level technological change.
The paper explores two pathways that are crucial for making knowledge economically useful – knowledge systematisation and knowledge reconfiguration – and analyses how their interplay enables the emergence of a new business function or activity. Knowledge systematisation is the abstraction and diffusion of operative principles to the effect of expanding to broader remits practices that had been initially conceived for a narrow purpose. Knowledge reconfiguration involves the conversion and formalisation of these novel practices within existing firm and industry organisation. Using the design activity as a lens, and drawing on primary and secondary interviews and archival data on the home furnishing sectors in Italy, our case study articulates the processes that facilitate the abstraction of general rules from novel practices and the changes that are necessary, both within firm and industry organisation, to foster their diffusion.
Consoli D., Vona F. and Saarivirta T. Analysis of the graduate labour market in Finland: spatial agglomeration and skill-job match, Regional Studies. During the 1990s Finland's economy went from deep ...recession to becoming among the most innovative and competitive within merely a decade. Economic recovery driven by the surge of information and communication technology (ICT)-related industries with the active support of the higher education system gave way also to growing inequalities among regions, especially within graduate workers. This paper elaborates an empirical analysis of the returns to education of a cohort entering the labour force between 1995 and 2005; the objective is to capture the extent of spatial and occupational determinants on income distribution as Finland slid from its most troubled to its most prosperous times.
This paper explores the relationship between regional human capital (HC) and the processes of knowledge creation and mobilisation due to higher education institutions. Although the nexus between ...these dimensions emerges frequently in both scholarly and policy discourses, to date no study has explicitly investigated how their connection works. Using occupations as a proxy for the skill content of jobs, we analyse individual (gender, schooling and age) and regional (university orientation) factors that influenced the HC employment structure in Spanish regions in the period 2003-2010. The main finding is that the teaching aspect of a university's mission is a robust predictor of high-skill employment, while the impact of engagement (research and knowledge transfer) activities is more sensitive to the structural characteristics of the regional socio-economic context.
Medicine, traditionally known as the art of healing, is evolving fast. One key development in this process is the transition from the ontology of "curing" to that of solving problems. As a result the ...matrix of knowledge-generating activities in medicine is inextricably linked to the emergence of multiple organizational configurations. This article explores the longitudinal development of the glaucoma medical specialty with a view to capture the patterns of division of labor that contributed to or followed from novel understanding of the disease. The historical background is corroborated by an analysis of collaborative scholarly research over the period 1973-2003 to illustrate how successive clinical and scientific modalities co-exist and influence each other. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Innovation is a collective process that entails the coordination of distributed knowledge across diverse organizations. Technology infrastructures provide innovation systems with governance ...mechanisms to create and sustain complementarities across otherwise dispersed competences. The paper presents innovation platforms as a specific case of technology infrastructure. Operating strategically at the interface between the public and the private sectors, platforms enable capacity- and capability-building for individuals, teams and organizations. Illustrative evidence on innovation platforms in the United Kingdom and Italy confirms the importance of institutional responsiveness to stimulate variety and ensure coordination in the context of collective innovation processes.
This paper analyses country-specific determinants of knowledge flows with a view to uncover the role of cross-organizational interactions. Using a sample of some 600,000 patents from the EU27 member ...states in the period 1990–2007, we take backward citations as dependent variable and find that technological sophistication and research size have a positive effect on knowledge flows. While a national bias towards applied research and development has a negative impact, individual public–private cooperation has a moderating effect due to the generation of scientific knowledge by public institutions. The present study contributes to the debate concerning the direction of R&D investments and provides empirical support to policies aimed at the enhancement of public–private cooperation.
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