The Foundations of Complex Evolving Economies Part One: Innovation, Organization, and Industrial Dynamics

The Foundations of Complex Evolving Economies seeks to offer an integrated analysis of the anatomy and physiology of the capitalist engine of generation and exploitation of technological organizational and institutional innovations - from the drivers of knowledge accumulation, to the modes in which such knowledge is incorporated into business firms, all the way to the processes of innovation-driven “Schumpeterian competition” and macroeconomic growth. In that, it advances the interpretation of such patterns, in terms of economies seen as complex evolving systems.

The basic objects of analysis are the history of the emergence and development of modern capitalist economies and their current functionings. Indeed , the tall ambition of the book is to address two basic questions at the core of the whole economic discipline since its inception. They regard, first, the drivers and patterns of change of the capitalistic machine of production and innovation and, second, the mechanisms of coordination among a multitude of self-seeking economic agents often characterized by conflicting interests.

In order to do that, this Manual, in addition to the nature of technology and innovation, considers from a profoundly alternative perspective, all domains of analysis typically addressed (or not) by microeconomic texts, including micro behaviours, the theory of the firm, the theory of production, consumption patterns, market dynamics, and industrial evolution.

Giovanni Dosi, Professor of economics at Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies,

Giovanni Dosi has been Professor of Economics at Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa, Italy) since 1998, where he has been Director of the Institute of Economics from 2011 to 2017 and founded the International Doctoral Program in Economics. He earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex and before joining Sant'Anna has been Director of the International Research Project on "Technological and Economic Dynamics" at the International Institute of Applied System Analysis, Laxenburg (Austria) and Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. He is a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the first academy of sciences in Italy. He was awarded The Wiley TIM Distinguished Scholar Award by the Technology and Innovation Management Division of the American Academy of Management (2016).

1. Introduction
2. Development and Growth as Institutionally Embedded Evolutionary Processes
3. Innovation as an Evolutionary Process
4. Behaviours, Learning, and Organizations in Complex and Evolving Environments
5. Formal Models of Learning, Innovation, and Diffusion
6. Knowledge, Procedures, and Input/Output Relations
7. Consumer Behaviours
8. Markets and their Organization
9. The Structure and Evolution of Industries
References