The extent to which firms can react creatively to rather than adjust passively against new techniques and practices is dependent on their command of technological knowledge and relative competence. This book explores the characteristics of the path dependent dynamics of localized technological change, demonstrating how the economics of complexity c

This book tackles the issue of technological and economic catch-up by examining the role that public research institutions and local policy play in the promotion of this process by fostering local science-technology linkages with incoming foreign-owned multinationals.

This comprehensive and innovative Handbook applies the tools of the economics of complexity to analyse the causes and effects of technological and structural change. It grafts the intuitions of the economics of complexity into the tradition of analysis based upon the Schumpeterian and Marshallian legacies. The Handbook elaborates the notion of innovation as an emerging property of the organized complexity of an economic system, and provides the basic tools to understand the recursive dynamics between the emergence of innovation and the unfolding of organized complexity. In so doing, it highlights the role of organizational thinking in explaining the introduction of innovations and the dynamics of structural change. With a new methodological approach to the economics of technological change, this wide-ranging volume will become the standard reference for postgraduates, academics and practitioners in the fields of evolutionary economics, complexity economics and the economics of innovation.

Antonelli illustrates his argument by reference to technological systems and complementarities, irreversibility, and collective knowledge; by examining the role of learning and technological communication as key factors in defining the rate and direction of change within technological systems; and by identifying technological districts and clusters within a theoretical framework which values local externalities, irreversibility, and endogenous structural change."

The ongoing process of revising and rethinking the foundations of economic theory leads to great complexities and contradictions at the heart of economics. ‘Economics of innovation’ provides a fertile challenge to standard economics, and one that can help it overcome its many criticisms. This authoritative book from Cristiano Antonelli provides a systematic account of recent advances in the economics of innovation. By integrating this account with the economics of technological change, this exceptional book elaborates an understanding of the effects of the introduction of new technologies. This excellent, comprehensive account from respected expert Antonelli will be much appreciated within the innovation economics community, yet it is also a book that should be read by all those with either a private or professional interest in economic theory.

Building on the idea of inclusive learning, which entails a process of shared prosperity across the globe, this work looks at funamental changes at the start of the new milliennium, as innovation is gaining increasing importance for local economic prosperity and the emergence of learning societies.

This book provides a unique set of empirical and theoretical analyses on the conditions, determinants and effects of the exchange and trade of technological knowledge. This work delivered by the research team lead by Bernard Guilhon shows that technological knowledge is more and more traded and exchanged in the market place. When and where contractual interactions are implemented by an institutional set-up which makes_the exchange better reliable for both parties. The new evidence provided by the book moreover makes it possible to appreciate the positive role of major knowledge rent externalities provided by the new quasi-markets for technological knowledge. Trade in technological knowledge leads in fact, as the book shows, to higher levels of division of labor, specialization and efficiency in the production and distribution of new technological knowledge. This dynamics is considered a part of a broader process where the generation of technological knowledge is itself becoming closer to the production of goods so that the division of labour among learning organization plays a growing role. Exchange of technological knowledge takes part because the conditions for appropriability are now far better that currently assumed by a large traditional literature. The analysis carried out through the book builds upon the notion of localized technological knowledge and suggests that the exchange of technological knowledge is not a spontaneous 'atmospheric' process.

Fiorenza Belussi, Giorgio Gottardi, and Enzo Rullani This volume collects some papers presented at the Vicenza conference "The Future of Districts", held in June 1999, organised by the Department of Technology and Management of Industrial Systems of the Faculty of Engineering of Padua University, with the collaboration of several engineers, industrial economists, and experts in the issue of technology management. This was the starting point of a long-lasting and painful colIective discussion, the results of which are documented here, during many meetings of this "itinerant" group, including the workshop in Padua, organised by Professor Luciano Pilotti and held in May 2001, "Systems, governance & knowledge within firm networks" at the Department of Economics of the University of Padua, and the recent international research seminar, held in May 2002, in Rome at the Tagliacarne Institute, within the EU sponsored project "Industrial districts' re location processes: identifying policies of EU enlargement West-East ID". The reason we decided to organise this book was not only to underline the importance of the industrial district (ID) model as a tool of propulsive local growth in a country like Italy. On the contrary, the idea that moved us was the theoretical dissatisfaction with the way in which the phenomenon of local development and industrial clustering of specific industries was treated in the international approach of the various disciplines.

This publication shows new information and communications technologies like mobile telephony and the Internet have been affecting low-income communities and small entrepreneurs in emerging economies.

This Oxford Handbook provides a fresh overall view and interpretation of the modern economic growth of one of the largest European countries, whose economic history is less known internationally than that of other comparably large and successful economies. It will provide, for the first time, a comprehensive, quantitative "new economic history" of Italy. The handbook offers an interpretation of the main successes and failures of the Italian economy at a macro level, the research--conducted by a large international team of scholars --contains entirely new quantitative results and interpretations, spanning the entire 150-year period since the unification of Italy, on a large number of issues. By providing a comprehensive view of the successes and failures of Italian firms, workers, and policy makers in responding to the challenges of the international business cycle, the book crucially shapes relevant questions on the reasons for the current unsatisfactory response of the Italian economy to the ongoing "second globalization." Most chapters of the handbook are co-authored by both an Italian and a foreign scholar.