General purpose technologies (GPT) have a significant impact on economic activity through radical technological change and wide technological diffusion. This paper aims to address the generality of technologies associated with the GPT concept. Information and communications technologies (ICT),...

The Europe 2020 Strategy has identified the key goal of smart, more inclusive and sustainable growth. In this direction, redirecting firms' innovation activities towards ecological targets without hampering their competitiveness is of paramount importance. The double externality issue related to...

The paper resumes the participation in PACITA (Parliaments and Civil Society in Technology Assessment) Summer School, in Liège, in June 2012. -- Technology Assessment ; Technology ; Society ; Innovation ; Conference ; PACITA

Scientific literature postulates that nanotechnology is to be considered as general purpose technology (GPT), characterized by pervasiveness, high technological dynamism and the inducement of innovations within a variety of applications. We set out to not only further systematize existing...

This study analyses the diffusion of renewable energy (RE) technologies. It analyses the transition dynamics as the sector broadens its energy mix and changes its capital stock. This shift is found to be desirable from an environmental, geopolitical and economic perspective. Yet, it greatly...

In the last decades, innovation activity has been defined by an increasing complexity and a faster pace of the underlying technological change. Accordingly, several studies have shown that competitive systems of innovation benefit from being able to build upon a wide but integrated spectrum of...

This paper explores the links between open innovation and the emergence of a phoenix industry - the low carbon vehicles sector - in the UK's traditional automotive heartland, focusing on the West Midlands region. It highlights three major factors in driving the development of this ‘phoenix'...

This paper explores the determinants of productivity in the countries of Eastern Europe (EE) through the perspective of ‘narrow' and ‘broad' national systems of innovation (NSI). Based on panel econometrics, it examines the extent to which systems in EE could be considered ‘(in)efficient.'...

Technology platform strategies offer a novel way to orchestrate a rich portfolio of contributions made by the many independent actors who form an ecosystem of heterogeneous complementors around a stable platform core. This form of organising has been successfully used in the smartphone, gaming,...

Innovation is a collective process that entails the coordination of distributed knowledge across diverse organizations. Technology infrastructures provide innovation systems with governance mechanisms to create and sustain complementarities across otherwise dispersed competences. The paper...