Preamble to the Study of Innovation

Abstract

Apart from early insights into the economics of innovation by some of the major thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries such as Smith, Ricardo or Marx, and the groundbreaking contribution of Schumpeter in the early 20th century, innovation did not really arouse the interest of economists before the second half of the 20th century (see Section 2.1). Although schol arly interest in the study of innovation is therefore still relatively recent, research on the role of innovation in economic and social change has flourished over the last five decades in a number of quite disparate economic fields such as macroeconomics (growth theory), industrial organization (organization and strategies of innovative firms), public finance (policies encouraging innovation), and economic development (technolog)? transfer, catching up and innovation system) (Hall and Rosenberg, 2010, p. 3). While only one out of 10,000 social science articles contained the word “innovation” in its title in the 1950s, this increased to almost 20 out of 10,000 in the 2000s (Fagerberg, 2005, p. 2). The multi-disciplinary nature of innovation research and its progressive implementation in mainstream economics have generated a plethora of literature. As underlined by Fagerberg (2005, p. 4), “the literature on innovation is so large and diverse that even keeping up-to-date with one specific field of research is very challenging”. As a consequence, although the knowledge about innovation its determinants and its social and economic impact has been greatly enhanced, the number of contributions to the field implies a selectivity in presenting research findings.