The Foundations of Complex Evolving Economies

Abstract

Abstract This Manual offers an integrated analysis of the ‘anatomy of the capitalist engine’ of generation and exploitation of technological, organisational, and institutional innovations and its dynamic socio-economic consequences. It starts from the identification of ‘what is there to be explained’—that is, the empirical and historical stylized facts at different levels of aggregation and different time scales—and then it moves to interpret them, from the drivers of knowledge accumulation to the modes in which such knowledge is incorporated into business firms and the processes of innovation-driven ‘Schumpeterian competition’ all the way to macroeconomic growth and development (in the forthcoming Volume II). The economy is interpreted as a complex evolving system in that a wide set of techno-economic phenomena are understood as emergent properties—outcomes of far-from-equilibrium interactions among heterogeneous agents, characterized by endogenous preferences, most often ‘boundedly rational’ but always capable of learning, adapting, and innovating with respect to their understandings of the world in which they operate, the technologies they master, their organizational forms, and their behavioural repertoires.

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