p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Arial} This timely book provides an intellectual and conceptual history of a key representation of innovation: technological innovation. Tracing the history of the discourses of scholars, practitioners and policy-makers, and exploring how and why innovation became defined as technological, Benoît Godin studies the emergence of the term, its meaning, and its transformation and use over time.

This book explores the ways in which education impacts labor markets. Specifically, the contributions in this book indicate that the future of labor is creative, socially aware and inter-disciplinary while identifying the changes and innovations needed in our educational systems to meet this demand. Due to an increasing automatization (robotic manufacturing), the character of labor and work in general will change dramatically in the near future. This will be the case not only in the western countries, but also in the larger emerging economies in Asia, for example China and India. While societal environments, economy and the character of labor are increasingly in a process of dramatic changes, the educational systems and the leading principles of research about labor and employment are not changing adequately. Cross-disciplinary (inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary) thinking and learning is not the main focus of our educational systems. Consequently, the systems of academic research follow and apply disciplinary or even sub-disciplinary strategies, avoiding cross-disciplinary research approaches, and not supporting inter-disciplinary academic career models. This book introduces such strategic models to better prepare the next generation of workers for the new knowledge economy, and the future of democratic societies.

This timely book explores technological innovation as a concept, dissecting its emergence, development and use. Benoît Godin offers an exciting new historiography of the subject, arguing that the study of innovation originates not from scholars but from practitioners of innovation.

This book presents an evolutionary theory of technological change based upon recent scholarship in the history of technology and upon relevant material drawn from economic history and anthropology. It challenges the popular notion that technology advances by the efforts of a few heroic individuals who produce a series of revolutionary inventions owing little or nothing to the technological past. Therefore, the book's argument is shaped by analogies taken selectively from the theory of organic evolution, and not from the theory and practice of political revolution. Three themes appear, and reappear with variations, throughout the study. The first is diversity: an acknowledgment of the vast numbers of different kinds of made things (artifacts) that have long been available to humanity; the second is necessity: the belief that humans are driven to invent new artifacts in order to meet basic biological requirements such as food, shelter, and defense; and the third is technological evolution: an organic analogy that explains both the emergence of novel artifacts and their subsequent selection by society for incorporation into its material life without invoking either biological necessity or technological progress. Although the book is not intended to provide a strict chronological account of the development of technology, historical examples - including many of the major achievements of Western technology: the waterwheel, the printing press, the steam engine, automobiles and trucks, and the transistor - are used extensively to support its theoretical framework. The Evolution of Techology will be of interest to all readers seeking to learn how and why technology changes, including both students and specialists in the history of technology and science.

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.

Ground-breaking yet non-technical analysis of the analogy that technological artefacts 'evolve' like biological organisms.

Technology refers to any set of standardised procedures for transforming raw materials into finished products. Innovation consists of any change in technology which has tangible and lasting effect on human practices, whether or not it provides utilitarian advantages. Prehistoric societies were never static, but the tempo of innovation occasionally increased to the point that we can refer to transformation taking place. Prehistorians must therefore identify factors promoting or hindering innovation.This volume stems from an international workshop, organised by the Collaborative Research Centre 1266 'Scales of Transformation' at Kiel University in November 2017. The meeting challenged its participants to detect and explain technological change in the past and its role in transformation processes, using archaeological and ethnographic case studies. The papers draw mainly on examples from prehistoric Europe, but case-studies from Iran, the Indus Valley, and contemporary central America are also included. The authors adopt several perspectives, including cultural-historical, economic, environmental, demographic, functional, and agent-based approaches.These case studies often rely on interdisciplinary research, whereby field archaeology, archaeometric analysis, experimental archaeology and ethnographic research are used together to observe and explain innovations and changes in the artisan's repertoire. The results demonstrate that interdisciplinary research is becoming essential to understanding transformation phenomena in prehistoric archaeology, superseding typo-chronological description and comparison.This book is a scholarly publication aimed at academic researchers, particularly archaeologists and archaeological scientists working on ceramics, osseous and metal artifacts.