Technology and Technometrics approachesne

The technological innovation, nowadays, is one of the most important determinant for increasing the wealth of the nations. Souder and Shrivastrava said “we can’t begin to make decisions about technology until we understand it. And we can’t begin to really understand it until we can measure it”. For this reason within the economics a new branch called Technometrics is born: it is a new theoretical framework for the conception and measurement of technological change with important policy implications (Sahal, 1985). The aim of this paper is, after introducing the concepts of technological innovation as used by the economists during the nineteenth and twentieth-century, to show the historical evolution of the several approaches used to measure and evaluate the technology and technology change from 1930 to 2004. A discussion of these approaches shows the methodological difficulties and their potentials.