The firm is the central actor for the effectuation of innovation and technological change. The large industrial laboratories of the previous century have given way to more organizationally and geographically diffuse sources of technology, placing even greater emphasis on the coordination skills...

This chapter reviews the growing literature on the “market for technology,” a broad term that denotes trade in technology disembodied from physical goods. The market for technology flourished during the nineteenth century in the United States. After several decades of relative decline, the...

Evidence on the “funding gap” for investment innovation is surveyed. The focus is on financial market reasons for underinvestment that exist even when externality-induced underinvestment is absent. We conclude that while small and new innovative firms experience high costs of capital that...

Collective invention occurs when competing organizations share knowledge about the design and development of new technologies. Such exchange and circulation of ideas and practices among communities of inventors was relatively common in the nineteenth century, most notably in geographically...

This chapter surveys the costs, risks, and challenges encountered in the progressive discovery and development of new pharmaceuticals. The changing methods by which drugs are discovered, the links between companies and academic science, the changing character of public regulation, and the sharp...

How has innovative and competitive behavior in computing and Internet markets evolved over the past half-century? In the first section of this review, I discuss these questions in light of six topics: the limited role for technology push; the diffusion of general-purpose technologies; the...

This chapter reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on learning by doing. Many of the distinctive theoretical implications of learning by doing have been derived under the assumption that the cost–quantity relationships observed in numerous empirical studies are largely the result of...

Almost 30 years ago, researchers began a systematic study of innovation by end users and user firms. At that time, the phenomenon was generally regarded as a minor oddity. Today, it is clear that innovation by users, generally openly shared, is a very powerful and general phenomenon. It is...

The geography of innovation describes the importance of proximity and location to innovative activity. As part of what has been termed the new economic geography, this area of research is less than 20 years old, and is now developed sufficiently so that the discussion can be organized around...