This book discusses the influence of technological and institutional change on development and growth, the impact on innovation of labor markets, the spatial distribution of innovation dynamics, and the meaning of knowledge generation and knowledge diffusion processes for development policies. The individual articles demonstrate the powerful possibilities that emerge from the toolkit of evolutionary and Schumpeterian economics. The book shows that evolutionary economics can be applied to the multi-facetted phenomena of economic development, and that a strong orientation on knowledge and innovation is key to development, especially in less developed and emerging economies.

This volume presents selected contributions from the 2018 conference of the International Schumpeter Society (ISS). The selected chapters in this volume reflect the state-of-the-art of Schumpeterian economics dedicated to the three conference topics innovation, catch-up, and sustainability. Innovation is driving catch-up processes and is the condition for a transformation towards higher degrees of sustainability. Therefore, Schumpeterian economics has to play a key role in these most challenging fields of human societies’ development in the 21st century. The three topics are well suited to capture the great variety of issues, which have the potential to shape the scientific discussion in economics and related disciplines in the years to come. The presented contributions show the broadness and high standard of Schumpeterian analysis. The ideas of dynamics, heterogeneity, novelty, and innovation as well as transformation are the most attractive fields in economics today and offer the most prolific interdisciplinary connections now and for the years to come when humankind, our global society, has to master the transition towards sustainable economic systems by solving the grand challenges and wicked problems with which we are confronted today. Therefore, the book is a must-read for scholars, researchers, and students, interested in a better understanding of innovation, catch-up, and sustainability, and Schumpeterian economics in general. The chapter “Industrial life cycle: relevance of national markets in the development of new industries for energy technologies – the case of wind energy” is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 License via link.springer.com.

This book combines the human development approach and innovation economics in order to explore the effects that structural economic change has on human development. While economic diversification can provide valuable new social choices and capabilities, it also tends to lead to more complex decision processes and changes to the set of capabilities required by people to self-determine their future. Within this process of structural transformation, social networks are crucial for accessing information and social support, but networks can also be a root cause of exclusion and inequality reproduction. This implies the need to encourage innovation and economic diversification beyond production expansion, focusing on the promotion of human agency and social inclusion. This book provides such a modern perspective on development economics, emphasizing the role of social networks, economic diversity and entrepreneurship for social welfare. The author discusses how innovation, social networks, economic dynamics and human development are interlinked, and provides several practical examples of social and micro-entrepreneurship in contexts as diverse as Peruvian rural villages and Brazil’s urban areas. The interdisciplinary perspective put forward in this book illustrates theoretical and methodological methods of exploring the complexity of development in a practical and relevant way. It also provides useful information about structural factors which need to be considered by practitioners when designing pro-poor growth policies. Furthermore, the coverage of the core concepts of innovation, networks and development economics, enriched with multiple examples, makes it a valuable resource for scholars and advanced students of modern development economics.

This book examines the historic role of professional and demanding military customers in industrial development. Particular emphasis is paid to public procurement of military equipment as a catalyst for innovation; and the civilian commercialization of military technologies (from gunpowder and cannons to submarines, missiles and aircraft) is documented by many case illustrations that show how macro-level productivity advance has been generated. A complementary volume to Advancing Public Procurement as Industrial Policy (2010), which focused on the spillover effects of the Swedish combat aircraft, Gripen, in this book Gunnar Eliasson widens the perspective to cover product development across the Swedish defense industry, with an emphasis on regional economic development and macro-economics, inter alia through the involvement of Saab (aircraft) and Kockums (submarines) in partnership ventures in Australia, Norway and Brazil. The volume is organized into four parts. Part one examines the historical transformation of the Swedish economy over the past three centuries from agriculture and raw materials to an advanced industrial economy. Part two presents detailed case studies to illustrate the spillover effects of procurement projects and military-industrial partnerships. Part three explains the spillover phenomenon theoretically within a dynamic micro- to macro-economic perspective. Particular emphasis is placed on the empirical credibility of model-based economy-wide and dynamic cost-benefit calculations. The book concludes with a section on fostering industrial development through public procurement. The result is a book that will appeal to economists in the industrial economics and management fields; to technical, marketing and purchasing executives in business; and to policy makers in public procurement concerned with innovation and long-run industrial development.

This book presents selected articles that discuss important issues related to entrepreneurship in Brazil, Russia, India and China as well as contributions from authors whose countries have a tradition on entrepreneurship support, such as Italy and the UK. The articles were presented and discussed in a conference on Entrepreneurship in Brazil in November 2013 organized by the Institute of Economics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and IBMEC Business School. This book covers four essential themes: financing entrepreneurs, innovation environments, social entrepreneurship and e-entrepreneurship.

One-size-fits-all cluster policies have been rightly criticized in the literature. One promising approach is to focus cluster policies on the specific needs of firms depending on the stage of development (emergence, growth, sustainment or decline) their cluster is in. In this highly insightful book, these stage-specific cluster policies are analysed and evaluated. Moreover, several chapters also focus on smart specialization policies to promote regional development by taking into account the emergence and adaptation of clusters and industries.