April 20, 2008
A symposium on the Varieties of Knowledge in the Economy with Carliss Baldwin, Richard Langois, Johann Peter Murmann and Richard Nelson will take place at the Schumpeter Conference in Brazil. More Details.
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Introducing Economic Evolution Net
For a number of years, we have planned a complementary website to Evolutionary Theories in the Social Sciences that would serve as a central resource and meeting place for people who interested in empirical research on economic change. The English language features of Economic-Evolution.Net are now fully implemented. We recently finished the EEpedia, which functions as a collaborative encyclopedia collecting empirical facts on economic evolution. We have also added a software tool for a collaborative bibliography. Finally, we have created a convenient list of data sources to be used in research on economic evolution. Explore these feature by clicking on the menus to your left. To allow people who are not comfortable writing in English to participate in the EEpedia project, we are presently creating the German, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish language versions of the EEpedia. Other language versions will follow later. If you want to receive automatic emails about new book reviews, data sources, conferences or working papers, can you subscribe to this service here.
July 15, 2007
Robert Solow reviews Thomas K. Mccraw’s new biography of Joseph Schumpeter in the New Republic. Read the review of Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Richard Langlois has also published a very useful review on EH.net.
August 1, 2006
The Comparative Industry Studies (CIS) Project
Evolutionary economists have articulated powerful theories about how industries change. During the last twenty years economists, sociologists, and business school scholars have begun to study empirically how particular industries develop over long periods of time. Because scholars frequently do not analyze the same aspects (variables), it often difficult to compare systematically across industries and figure out what causes lie behind the similarities and differences in patters of industry evolution.
To make it easier in future studies to compare across industries and come up with causal explanations, we need to formulate an analytical framework, i.e. a common list of characteristics that future studies could trace. Such a framework needs to combines concepts from traditional industrial organization economics, evolutionary economics, innovation studies, and institutional theory broadly defined. Participate in formulating this framework by going to the Comparative Industry Studies Project page in the EEpedia.
November 02, 2004
Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: The Coevolution of Firms, Technology, and National Institutions
Johann Peter Murmann compares the development of the synthetic dye industry in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States through the lenses of evolutionary theory. As Murmann demonstrates, a complex coevolutionary process linking firms, technology, and national institutions resulted in very different degrees of industrial success among the dye firms in the three countries. The book won Joseph Schumpter Prize and the Stanley Reiter in 2004. Download Introductory ChapterAugust 2004
Timur Kuran has written a fascinating paper on Why the Middle East is economically underdeveloped. Anyone interested in social evolution will find this timely paper worth reading. Download Paper
July 02, 2004
Managing New Industry Creation [in Global Flat Panel Display Industry]
The flat panel display (FPD) industry was the first new manufacturing industry to fully emerge in a global economy defined more by trade in knowledge than in physical products. Drawing upon interviews with over 160 managers and scientists from around the world who helped found the FPD industry, the authors identify successful strategies for knowledge-driven competition. They also make policy recommendations for business and government decision makers concerned with maintaining a healthy technology baseJuly 02, 2004
From Silicon Valley to Singapore: Location and Competitive Advantage in the Hard Disk Drive Industry
The book explains how decisions about location helped US firms achieve global dominance in the hard disk drive industry. Details how American firms were able to develop two complementary industry clusters, with fundamental research and product development concentrated in the US (principally California), and manufacturing in Southeast Asia. This example offers new perspectives on the sources of industrial leadership, strategic behavior, and the geographic evolution of industry.June 2004
A Workshop on Adaptation vs. Selection in Industrial Change will take place at the Academy of Management Meeting in New Orleans, August 7, 2004.
January 17, 2003
The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy
In The Gifts of Athena, Joel Mokyr argues that the growth explosion in the modern West in the past two centuries was driven not just by the appearance of new technological ideas but also by the improved access to these ideas in society at large - as made possible by social networks comprising universities, publishers, professional sciences, and kindred institutions. He shows that changes in the intellectual and social environment and the institutional background in which knowledge was generated and disseminated brought about the Industrial Revolution."September 2002
A Workshop on Cognitions and Capabilities is taking place at Harvard. Click here for details.
May 2002
A workshop on “Empirical research on routines in business and economics: Towards a research program” will be held on the November 3-4 in Odense, Denmark. Click here for a call for papers.
April 2002
The Fourth International Workshop on Institutional Economics will be held on the July 3 and 5 at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Click here for details.
March 2002
A roundtable on “Resources, Routines and Industrial Dynamics in the Experimentally Organized Economy” will be held on the October 24 and 25 in Hirtshals, Denmark. Click here for details. The first English translation of the seventh chapter of Schumpeter’s 1912 classic “Theory of Economic Evolution” will appear in a special issue on Industry and Innovation. Click here for a table of contents.
May 2001
Evolutionary Theory in Management and Organization Theory at the Beginning of a New Millennium: A Symposium on the State of the Art and Opportunities for Future Research in Evolutionary Theory. You can now read a transcript of the symposium that took place on Aug 7 2000, in Toronto, Canada. The symposium was organized by Johann Peter Murmann, and the speakers were Howard Aldrich, Dan Levinthal and Sid Winter. Click here for conference details.
November 2000
A conference took place in honor of the Richard R. Nelson at Columbia University in New York. Click here for details on the conference and the papers presented. You can read there Sidney Winter’s speech “The Evolution of Dick Nelson” and go on a photo tour.
March 2000
Design Rules, Vol.1: The Power of Modularity by Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark
From the Publisher: We live in a dynamic economic and commercial world, surrounded by objects of remarkable complexity and power. In many industries, changes in products and technologies have brought with them new kinds of firms and forms of organization. We are discovering news ways of structuring work, of bringing buyers and sellers together, and of creating and using market information. Although our fast-moving economy often seems to be outside of our influence or control, human beings create the things that create the market forces. Devices, software programs, production processes, contracts, firms, and markets are all the fruit of purposeful action: they are designed. Using the computer industry as an example, Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark develop a powerful theory of design and industrial evolution. They argue that the industry has experienced previously unimaginable levels of innovation and growth because it embraced the concept of modularity, building complex products from smaller subsystems that can be designed independently yet function together as a whole. Modularity freed designers to experiment with different approaches, as long as they obeyed the established design rules. Drawing upon the literatures of industrial organization, real options, and computer architecture, the authors provide insight into the forces of change that drive today’s economy.
February 08, 2000
Organizations Evolving
[From etss.net] We are kicking off our book review feature today (February 8, 2000) with Howard Aldrich's new oeuvre "Organizations Evolving." (Click on title for table of contents) Hayagreeva Rao and Arthur Stinchcombe have read the book over the holidays for us and we are very pleased to publish their reviews on etss.net. As will be customary for all our reviews, we invited Howard Aldrich to respond to the two evaluations of his book. You can share your views and participate in a discussion of the book by posting a message at the end of the review.January 2000
Abstracts of important new working papers by Joel Mokyr are now posted.
November 1999
The Demography of Corporations and Industries
by Glenn R. Carroll and Michael T. Hannan
The publisher’s preview: The Demography of Corporations and Industries is the first book to present the demographic approach to organizational studies in its entirety. It examines the theory, models, methods, and data used in corporate demographic research. Carroll and Hannan explore the processes by which corporate populations change over time, including organizational founding, growth, decline, structural transformation, and mortality. They review and synthesize the major theoretical mechanisms of corporate demography, ranging from aging and size dependence to population segregation and density dependence. The book also explores some selected implications of corporate demography for public policy, including employment and regulation. Click on the title for a table of contents. Read Boyan Jovanovic’s Review in the JEL.
October 1999
Sources of Industrial Leadership: Studies of Seven Industries.
David Mowery and Richard R. Nelson
This book describes and analyzes how seven major high-tech industries evolved in the USA, Japan, and Western Europe. The industries covered are machine tools, organic chemical products, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, computers, semiconductors, and software. In each of these industries, firms located in one or a very few countries became the clear technological and commercial leaders. In number of cases, the locus of leadership changed, sometimes more than once, over the course of the histories studied. The locus of the book is on the key factors that supported the emergence of national leadership in each industry, and the reasons behind the shifts when they occurred. Special attention is given to the national policies which helped to create, or sustain, industrial leadership. Click on the title for a table of contents. Read Paul L. Robertson’s Review on eh.net.
February 27, 1999
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures.Testing Email Subscription Functionality
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Evolutionary Innovations: The Business of Biotechnology by Maureen D. McKelvey
This book examines the initial commercial uses of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is one of the most modern, controversial and dynamic of the science based technologies. It is not an object but a set of techniques or way of doing things. The development of these techniques from the 1970s onwards illustrates the changing relationships between universities and firms and between basic science and research oriented towards commercial uses. The main focus of the book is on two firms - Genentech in the United States and Kabi in Sweden and their activities and ‘knowledge-seeking’ behavior in the development of human growth hormone and how those ran in parallel with university science. As well as providing a remarkably clear account of these developments (the book includes a chapter on the basics of biotechnology for the lay person), McKelvey also provides a fresh contribution to our understanding of innovation processes by using the evolutionary metaphor to interpret patterns of change where novelty, transmission, and selection are important elements, and where the knowledge-seeking behavior of firms and other agents are critical for survival and development. The book will be of considerable interest to a wide audience concerned to understand the complexities of innovation processes in the ‘knowledge society’ - management and organization researchers, economists, policy advisers, managers and strategies responsible for turning knowledge into product and profit.
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Advisory Board
- Carliss Baldwin (Harvard)
- Giovanni Dosi (Pisa)
- John Foster (Queensland)
- Louis Galambos (Johns Hopkins)
- Mauro Guillen (Pennsylvania)
- Constance Helfat (Dartmouth)
- Geoffrey Hodgson (Hertfordshire)
- Geoffrey Jones (Harvard)
- Steven Klepper (Carnegie Mellon)
- Richard Langlois (Connecticut)
- Stanley Metcalfe (Manchester)
- Joel Mokyr (Northwestern)
- Sidney Winter (Pennsylvania)
- Ulrich Witt (Max Planck)