Introduction: long term economic development – demand, finance, organization, policy and innovation in a Schumpeterian perspective

Abstract

The general theme of the 13th International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society Conference, held during June 21st–24th, 2010 at Aalborg University in Denmark, was the exploration of the interrelated phenomena of innovation, organization, sustainability and crises. By addressing these phenomena an attempt was made to confront some of the underexplored parts the Schumpeterian legacy, but there was also room for new results concerning more well-developed parts of evolutionary economics. The five plenary sessions concerned: advances in the understanding of industrial evolution; new research on entrepreneurship, spill-overs and regional development; the analysis of innovation-based growth, fluctuations and crises; the current crises in a long-term historical perspective; and the processes of development in relation to the problems of catching-up, falling behind and forging ahead. The scope of the conference can be recognized by the broad range of topics that was covered by the 62 parallel sessions. The session titles included: finance and innovation; evolutionary economic development; perspectives on patenting and licensing; creative destruction and labor mobility; consumption and evolution; evolution and development; incentives, learning and complexity; agent-based modeling; financial innovation and financial crisis; innovation in pharmaceuticals; knowledge networks; capitalism, labor markets