Over the past two decades, Australia has failed to build significant positions in the technological revolution that has transformed the global economy. In high-tech industries such as software and electronics Australia has been left behind, and in emerging sectors such as biotechnology, it...

The aim of this chapter is to explore some of the issues and to underline the main aspects that have been focussed upon in the PILOT project. We begin the chapter with consideration of why so much academic and policy attention has been paid, in our view disproportionately, to high-tech...

It is frequently claimed that innovation is essential to economic performance, but such claims are usually quite general and abstract. Often they apply indistinguishably to economic growth generally, to the competitiveness of national economies, to the profitability, survival and growth of...

The top 500 industrial R&D spenders outside the European Union increased their R&D investment by 3.9 percent to 195.6 billion [euro] in fiscal 2003. In contrast, the EU top 500 cut their R&D spending 2.0 percent to 100.8 billion [euro]. The compound annual growth rate for 2000-2003 was 1.2...

It is often argued that high tech industries drive growth processes, and that they are the sources of growth in output, employment and productivity in the knowledge economy. This is a special case of a more general argument that economic growth is characterized by the creation of new and the...

One of the striking features of the economics of both development and growth, both in the mainstream and its self-styled heterodox alternatives, is a resolute failure to take account of some key empirical and historical characteristics of the world we live in. The major problem seems to be an...