Using patent data for four countries (Germany, France, United Kingdom, and Italy) for the period 1968-86, the authors find that the patterns of innovative activities differ systematically across technological classes, while remarkable similarities emerge across countries in the patterns of...

The special issue is introduced and contextualised. “Technological paradigms” emerged as “science push” models of innovation were being displaced by “demand pull” models that justified a more international, market-focussed political economy. Technological paradigms help explain the...

This paper focuses on the relationships between observed patterns of innovative activities within a sector and the related context and underlying microeconomic processes that might account for them. It claims that there are some invariant features (with respect to relative prices and incentives...

This paper is a first attempt at modelling the long-term dynamics of market structure and innovation in the pharmaceutical industry in a history-friendly way. The model examines the relationships between the nature of the search space, demand, the patterns of competition, and industry evolution...

This article proposes that learning by firms lies at the root of incremental technical change in industry. Firms may, therefore, be seen as learning organizations for the acquisition, accumulation, and generation of knowledge. Furthermore, firms may be characterized by different levels and types...

In this essay, we argue that the rational choice (RC) provides an inadequate foundation for a theory of economic action. After defining RC sufficiently broadly to encompass much of the bounded rationality literature as well as neoclassical optimization theory, we present three principal...