An introductory overview of innovation studies

The purpose of this paper is to provide a broad overview of the field of innovation studies. We focus on the the economics and sociology of innovation, which we can define as the study of the dynamic processes of generation, development, adoption ad diffusion of innovations in the economic and social system, as well as the characteristics of such processes and their effects on society and the economy. In order to present the many, complex and sometimes overlapping strands of research on innovation, we have chosen a disciplinary criterion. We have therefore identified several different theoretical perspectives on innovation and within each one we have tried to unravel the main issues that are being investigated. However, any attempt to categorise and streamline such a complex topic does, to some exent, introduce arbitrary distinctions in the analysis. In the last section, we explicitly focus on trying to re-estabilish some connections between different perspectives, and we try to uncover some general trends in innovation studies.