Is Schumpeter Still a Useful Guiding Light for Global Innovation and Growth Research?
Gerald Silverberg, UNU-MERIT
Joseph Schumpeter provided most of the fundamental concepts still used in innovation studies today: radical vs. incremental innovation; clustering of innovations; innovation as recombinant creativity; long waves of economic growth. With the increasing availability of empirical data on the one hand (e.g., patent citation networks; exports disaggregated by product type), and improvements in statistical and complexity analysis on the other (e.g., extreme-value statistics, Poisson regression, network analysis), it is now possible to operationalize and test some of these ideas. In this overview, I will examine to what extent Schumpeter’s original concepts have held up, to what extent they need to be reformulated, and what new hypotheses emerge from an application of modern methods to data sources Schumpeter could only have dreamed about.
About the speaker
Gerald Silverberg studied physics and mathematics at Cornell and Harvard Universities in the USA. He worked as a science journalist in New York before moving to Europe and studying economics and economic history as well as mathematical systems theory. He was a Research Associate at the University of Stuttgart from 1983 to 1987 with primary responsibility for a research project on technical change and the theory of self-organization, sponsored by the German Research Council (DFG). In 1987, he was employed by the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study (IFIAS), and in 1995/96 was a Senior Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He has been a Senior Research Fellow at UNU-MERIT (Maastricht, NL) since January 1988 and a Visiting Research Scholar at IIASA (Laxenburg, A) since 2006.
Venue: Room 0.16, Boschstraat 24
Date: 16 November 2015
Time: 11:00 - 12:00 CET