Introduction

Abstract

This picture was certainly in Schumpeter’s mind in his early analysis of technological change, where science (an invention) was viewed as a meta-economic phenomenon with results that allowed an “entrepreneurlinnovator” to enter the market with a new firm. The inadequacy of this view soon emerged in Schumpeter’s following works and, over the years, the researchers interested in economic change have begun to develop different approaches in which the main modes of dealing with change were either through comparative statics or as an aspect of a moving equilibrium. But the former says nothing about how the system moves from one equilibrium to the next, and in the lauer, the behavioural assumptions of standard equilibrium theory do not have much explanatory power outside the equilibrium.

“The popular movie image of the scientist has been that of a remote, and perhaps even eccentric figure, typically absent-minded, rumple-dressed and badly in need of a hair cut, who pursued arcane questions not understood by the man of the street, who was certainly not practical, and who was, equally certainly, not primarily responding to economic motives.” (Rosenberg, 2001, p.8)¹.