The paper unravels the subversive nature of Schumpeter’s proposition that entrepreneurscarry out innovations (the micro level), that swarms of followers imitate them (meso) andthat, as a consequence, ‘creative destruction’ leads to economic development ‘fromwithin’ (macro). It is argued that Schumpeter paved the way for a new micro–meso–macro framework in economics. Centre stage is meso. Its essential characteristic isbimodality, meaning that one idea (the generic rule) can be physically actualised by manyagents (a population). Ideas can relate to others, and, in this way, meso constitutes astructure component of a ‘deep’ invisible macro structure. Equally, the rule actualisationprocess unfolds over time – modelled in the paper as a meso trajectory with three phasesof rule origination, selective adoption and retention – and here meso represents a processcomponent of a visible ‘surface’ structure. The universal macro measure with a view tothe appropriateness of meso components is generic correspondence. At the level of ideas,its measure is order; at that of actual relative adoption frequencies, it is genericequilibrium. Economic development occurs at the deep level as transition from onegeneric rule to another, inducing a change of order, and at the surface level as the newrule is adopted, destroying an old equilibrium and establishing a new one. The final thirdof the paper discusses a few of the rich set of major contributions to the Neo-Schumpeterian – micro-meso-macro - programme...
