The Life Cycle of Innovations and Kondratiev Waves in the Context of the Conception of Industry 4.0

Abstract

The nature of long Kondratiev waves, reflecting the cyclical nature of economic development, has attracted the attention of scholars for more than a hundred years. This problem becomes especially relevant in times of global crises. And although this theory do not belong to the mainstream of economic thought, the great theorists of the twentieth century have tried to either prove or disprove the reality of the very existence of long waves. The very idea of the non-linearity of the development of a system of any nature was impossible within the framework of the science of the nineteenth century, therefore, in order to understand the revolutionary nature of Kondratiev?s ideas and his contribution to changing the paradigm of economic science, the work compares the epistemological principles that were inherent in the science of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, the main attention is paid to consideration of the fundamentals of thermodynamics of non-equilibrium processes, which examines the processes of self-organization in open systems, and synergetics, one of the cornerstones of which is the axiom of the non-additivity of the properties of the whole as an aggregate of the properties of its parts. The paper demonstrates the application of such a system of scientific views to determine the features of the life cycle of innovations. This approach makes it possible to apply the mathematical apparatus of non-linear dynamics to study the evolution of non-equilibrium economic systems and to determine the final state of the system by studying its possible trajectories in phase space. The respective analysis of the development of endogenous theories of long cycles made it possible to investigate how views on the place of innovations in determining the nature of Kondratiev waves changed. It is shown that it is not the presence of innovations that is essential, but the formation of an innovation cluster. Such a cluster consists of the so-called improving innovations, the use of which contributes only to the quantitative growth of economic indicators, and the catalyst is the basic (or systemic) innovations, the implementation of which determines the transition of the economic system to a new industrial type. In further research, it is expedient to use such an approach to the analysis of the ways of evolution of the economy in the context of sustainable development.