The entrepreneurial theory of the firm argues that entrepreneurship, properly understood, is a crucial but neglected element in explaining the nature and boundaries of the firm. By contrast, the theory of the entrepreneurial firm presumably seeks not to understand the nature and boundaries of...

In a marvelous but somewhat neglected paper, 'The Corporation: Will It Be Managed by Machines?' Herbert Simon articulated from the perspective of 1960 his vision of what we now call the New Economy the machine-aided system of production and management of the late twentieth century. Simon's...

In this survey, we examine the operations of innovation processes within industrial districts by exploring the ways in which differentiation, specialization, and integration affect the generation, diffusion, and use of new knowledge in such districts. We begin with an analysis of the importance...

The recent efflorescence of interest in "endogenous" theories of economic growth has focused attention on the nature and role of knowledge in the growth process (Romer 1986, 1990; Grossman and Helpman 1990, 1994). Unlike earlier models of growth (Solow 1956; Swan 1956) in which technological change...

Modularity is a very general set of principles for managing complexity. By breaking up a complex system into discrete modules - which can then communicate with one another only through standardized interfaces within a standardized architecture - one can eliminate what would otherwise be an...

Transaction costs, one often hears, are the economic equivalent of friction in physical systems. Like physicists, economists can sometimes neglect friction in formulating theories; but like engineers, they can never neglect friction in studying how the system actually does let alone should work....