This comprehensive and innovative Handbook applies the tools of the economics of complexity to analyse the causes and effects of technological and structural change. It grafts the intuitions of the economics of complexity into the tradition of analysis based upon the Schumpeterian and Marshallian legacies. The Handbook elaborates the notion of innovation as an emerging property of the organized complexity of an economic system, and provides the basic tools to understand the recursive dynamics between the emergence of innovation and the unfolding of organized complexity. In so doing, it highlights the role of organizational thinking in explaining the introduction of innovations and the dynamics of structural change. With a new methodological approach to the economics of technological change, this wide-ranging volume will become the standard reference for postgraduates, academics and practitioners in the fields of evolutionary economics, complexity economics and the economics of innovation.

The ongoing process of revising and rethinking the foundations of economic theory leads to great complexities and contradictions at the heart of economics. ‘Economics of innovation’ provides a fertile challenge to standard economics, and one that can help it overcome its many criticisms. This authoritative book from Cristiano Antonelli provides a systematic account of recent advances in the economics of innovation. By integrating this account with the economics of technological change, this exceptional book elaborates an understanding of the effects of the introduction of new technologies. This excellent, comprehensive account from respected expert Antonelli will be much appreciated within the innovation economics community, yet it is also a book that should be read by all those with either a private or professional interest in economic theory.

Fiorenza Belussi, Giorgio Gottardi, and Enzo Rullani This volume collects some papers presented at the Vicenza conference "The Future of Districts", held in June 1999, organised by the Department of Technology and Management of Industrial Systems of the Faculty of Engineering of Padua University, with the collaboration of several engineers, industrial economists, and experts in the issue of technology management. This was the starting point of a long-lasting and painful colIective discussion, the results of which are documented here, during many meetings of this "itinerant" group, including the workshop in Padua, organised by Professor Luciano Pilotti and held in May 2001, "Systems, governance & knowledge within firm networks" at the Department of Economics of the University of Padua, and the recent international research seminar, held in May 2002, in Rome at the Tagliacarne Institute, within the EU sponsored project "Industrial districts' re location processes: identifying policies of EU enlargement West-East ID". The reason we decided to organise this book was not only to underline the importance of the industrial district (ID) model as a tool of propulsive local growth in a country like Italy. On the contrary, the idea that moved us was the theoretical dissatisfaction with the way in which the phenomenon of local development and industrial clustering of specific industries was treated in the international approach of the various disciplines.