New technologies may be heralded as life-changing innovations or feared as risks to moral values, human health, and environmental safety. Anxieties surrounding technology are often heightened by perceptions that their benefits will accrue to small sections of society while the risks are more widely distributed. Innovation and Its Enemies identifies the tension between the need for innovation and the pressure to maintain continuity, social order and stability as one of today's biggest policy challenges. It looks at a number of historical examples, including coffee, electricity, margarine, farm mechanization, recorded music, transgenic crops and transgenic animals, to show how new technologies emerge, take root and create new institutional ecologies that favor their dominance in the marketplace.

Industrial transformation is a research and teaching field with a focus on the phenomenon and mechanisms of industrial development and renewal. It concerns changes in economic activities caused by innovation, competition and collaboration, and has a rich heritage of evolutionary economics, institutional economics, industrial dynamics, technology history and innovation studies. It borrows concepts and models from the social sciences (sociology, history, political sciences, business/management, economics, behavioural sciences) and also from technology and engineering studies. In this book, the authors present the key theories, frameworks and concepts of industrial transformation and use empirical cases to describe and explain the causes, processes and outcomes of transformation in the context of digitalization and sustainability. They stress that industrial transformation consists both of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" selection, and of intentional pursuits of innovation, and of industrial capabilities creation. The work argues that managing the global trends of transformation is not only about new technology and innovation: existing institutional settings and dynamic interactions between technological change, organizational adaptation and economic activities also have a profound impact on future trajectories. The areas under investigation are of great relevance for strategic management decisions and industrial and technology policies, and understanding the mechanisms underlying transformation and sustainable growth.

Automation and technological change in USA - principal methods used by private sector employers to ease workers adaptation and reassignment of displaced employees. (1) avoiding layoff (attrition, retirement, reduction of hours of work, retraining,automation fund), (2) easing burden of unemployment (severance pay, maintenance of acquired rights, unemployment benefit), (3) facilitating employment opportunity (employment service, training programme, antidiscrimination policy). Case studies.