Abstract
The history of human society has been marked by the impact of inventions that were able to spread as innovations in daily, economic and military life. In the past, inventions were not frequent and they were transformed with difficulty into innovations, which spread slowly through the market, but today the situation has been radically upturned, so that this stage has been described as one of “permanent innovation” (Foray 2000; It. trans. 2006, p. 50). In some fields, like pharmaceuticals, IT and biotechnology, the goal of innovation pervades the company’s entire organisational structure. In these areas, the invention generation rate becomes so high that it can rapidly makes some innovations obsolete, consequently blocking their spread. In these cases we risk losing the economic benefits associated to the innovation, in other words we risk reducing or cancelling the growing benefits of the adoption of innovations (Arthur 1989).
This chapter is a modified version of Viale R. (2008). Origini storiche dell’innovazione permanente. In R. Viale (a cura di). La cultura dell’innovazione, Milano: Editrice Il Sole 24 Ore.
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Notes
- 1.
In the original version the first C was represented by the Italian word “Conoscenza” translated in English as Knowledge.
- 2.
The broader interpretation of the concept of innovation was recently also reiterated by the third edition of the Oslo manual (OECD/Eurostat 2005).
- 3.
According to methodological cognitivism (Viale 2012), any social choice is based on the cognitive activity of processing the premises that indicate the possible goals and the tools to achieve them. Knowledge therefore structures the social player’s cognitive activity of reasoning and decision-making. We can say that cognitive activity is under-determined (in as far as the Causal relationship is not deterministic) by the knowledge base. It represents the premises or conditions for the action (or in other words, its condition-action rules). However, the individual knowledge base does not only contain the empirical representation of the social context, the values, the principles and the rules that govern social interaction, or the initial conditions linked to the peculiar characteristics of the social players with whom we must interact. It also contains the metacognitive principles that guide the act of reasoning and decision-making. In fact, cognitive activity processes information according to rules and principles that are born from the interaction between an innate inherited endowment (Viale 2006), and particular rules and principles learned culturally, implicitly from daily social interaction and explicitly from forms of formal learning (scholastic, professional and cultural). From this perspective, we can say that through these forms of learning, society underpins the cognitive base of the social player. A recursive process is therefore created: the cognitive base underpins the social action, which underpins the social phenomenon in the aggregation of similar actions; and these, together with other phenomena underpin the cognitive basis of the social player.
- 4.
In this article we underline the difference between institutions and organisations reiterated by North (1990). By institutions we refer to constraints and incentives generated by formal or informal standards that guide individuals’ choices inside or outside social organisations. By organisation we refer to a group of individuals who share a common goal and act on the basis of specific institutional constraints. To use a metaphor from sport, the institutions are the rules of the game and the organisations are the teams.
- 5.
We refer to Knight’s definition (1940) of the risk of an event as an estimate of the probability of it occurring. This does not imply an assessment of the individual utility of the event, as it does in some cases in the field of psychology.
- 6.
In Bayes’ terms, the perceived risk of the effects of an action in an instable environment (posterior probability) is generated not only by the poor predictability of events on the basis of available information (empirical evidence), but also by knowledge of the successes and failures of similar actions in the past (prior probability). As a result, highly instable environments, but with positive rates of past success, reduce the perceived risk and therefore the need for a high propensity to risk in order to act.
- 7.
In fact, in these cases “composite techniques” may be generated (Mokyr 2002b, p. 35) based on the recombination of known techniques (such as using metal boxes instead of glass bottles) without any knowledge of the causal mechanisms of the phenomenon. However, these are short-lived innovations whose economic impact is rapidly exhausted.
- 8.
In this chapter we will treat descriptive knowledge and empirical generalization as synonyms.
- 9.
This is the knowledge incarnated in the capacity to do, in know-how, as expressed in the case of the manual ability of a craftsman or pianist.
- 10.
This is knowledge of the principles, values and ethical, ontological, epistemological and social models that makes it possible to give meaning to our choices, to interpret social reality and to represent the physical world.
- 11.
These are rules of inductive reasoning, problem solving and decision-making heuristics and rules for the generation of language that allow us to perform cognitive tasks, and to reason, argue and interact strategically with others.
- 12.
Recently, particularly since the development of information technologies, the tacit competence knowledge component, even in the cases in which it remains significant, can be codified more easily and transferred (occasionally even finding a way of “incorporating” it into a mechanical or digital device, even without articulating it completely). In other words, the individual scientist’s know-how (e.g. chemical) can remain important but as the cognitive base extends and widens, it also becomes increasingly simple to develop equipment and tools that “incorporate” this knowledge in some way and allow it to be transferred to others.
- 13.
The term dual career refers to the presence, alongside the traditional role of the researcher, of an academic profession that targets the development of new technologies, their industrial exploitation and the generation and management of new spin-off companies.
- 14.
As foresight analysis tends to underline (for example the National Science Foundation 2002), the convergence between biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, ICT and cogno-technologies seems to strengthen the central role of the university as the sole institution able to draw on the necessary technical-scientific competence and professional skills to research new hybrid technologies.
- 15.
For example, during Frederick Terman’s term as Provost of Stanford University, the Industrial Affiliates Program allowed participating industrial companies to assign their research staff for a certain period to the departmental structures of the university, using the laboratories structures, offices and facilities, and updating their knowledge under the supervision of the academic staff.
- 16.
One of the effects of this revolution was the possibility of creating the first markets where prices were generated by free bargaining between the parties and not fixed by state, feudal or municipal authorities. In the world there were offshore areas like the Caribbean, the southern coasts of the United States, Malaysia and North Africa, outside the domination of the European states, that were very often in the hands of pirates and smugglers. The new routes made possible by the larger, faster ships, brought more goods to these territories, which were sold at prices created by the logic of demand and supply. The first examples of a market as we envisage it today emerged in these extra-territorial areas. Maritime illegality was a fundamental element in the evolution from a mediaeval economy to a modern economy. When Adam Smith (1776) published his theory of the system of market prices, they already existed on most trade routes, favoured by the illegal behaviour of American merchants, European smugglers and Eastern pirates (as he admitted himself in his work).
- 17.
In economic theory, the accumulation of capital is equal to production minus consumption. As a result, production being equal, an increase in capital derives from a decrease in consumption.
- 18.
In fact, initially they opted not for mergers but for trusts, which maintained the legal personalities of the individual firms. However, as we have seen, the introduction of the Sherman Law against cartels made most trusts illegal, forcing businessmen and financiers to opt for mergers (Rosenberg and Mowery 1998; It. trans., 2001, p. 18).
- 19.
In other terms, we can consider this phenomenon as an example of network outsourcing. The more large companies are listed, the more the stock market attracts investors, and the more the stock market increases its utility for the listed company.
- 20.
This contagion will go in both directions, as we can see from the evolution of universities towards a business model since the end of the war.
- 21.
An asset cannot be excluded when it is difficult to prevent others from taking advantage; in the case of knowledge, excludability may be implemented legally with the creation of a temporary private monopoly, with a patent or copyright.
- 22.
An asset is not rival when an unlimited number of agents can use it without exhausting it. Take the case of a theorem or a scientific law.
- 23.
As asset is cumulative when it allows other assets to be generated. For example, a scientific law can be applied to generate a technological invention.
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Viale, R. (2013). Behaviours and Values that Prompted Permanent Innovation. In: Methodological Cognitivism. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40216-6_11
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