This book illustrates that, although innovation has always mattered in economic development, simply increasing expenditure in creating knowledge may not be the answer: we need to look at the whole system through which such knowledge translates to value creation.

Conceptualizing growth trajectories of organizations in organismic terms describing transitions through a series of stages, from birth to maturity, has considerable intuitive appeal. Recently, the assumptions underpinning the life-cycle perspective (growth is linear, sequential, deterministic...