Production theory in the neoclassical tradition is strong on Abstract generality. Its high level of Abstraction tends to impede understanding of technological change, partly because its perspective on production differs so much from those of engineers, managers and technologists. A more grounded...

This note expounds the abstract fundamentals of the appropriability problem, re-assessing insights from three classic contributions those of Schumpeter, Arrow and Teece. Whereas the first two contributions were explicitly concerned with the implications of appropriability for society at large,...

This paper offers a sketch of what an economic theory of the firm would look like if it were founded on the thought of Joseph Schumpeter, particularly on Chapters 1-2 of his Theory of Economic Development. Schumpeterian analysis requires an intuitively appealing and realistic conceptualization...

This essay first reviews what Nelson and Winter were trying to accomplish when they put forward An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Belknap Press, Harvard, 1982). It then does a fast-forward to controversies and contributions in the recent past, and speculates on where the intellectual...

It is widely believed that while society allows technology to be private property, scientific knowledge is public and open. However, over the past quarter-century there has been increasing patenting of quite basic scientific knowledge. This essay argues that this is potentially a very serious...

It is widely recognized that advances in knowhow have been the key driving force between the great improvements in human material well-being that have been achieved over the past two centuries. However, not much attention has been directed to the fact that the advances in knowhow that have been...

The last quarter-century has seen the rise of an almost religious belief in the efficacy of market organization of economic activity. While there are strong empirically supported reasons for a bias toward market organization, particularly considering the alternatives, there are many areas of...