Study Of Technical Change Research Articles

Explaining Productivity Change in Underdeveloped Agriculture. Can the Theory of Induced Innovation Do It?

The microeconomic version of the theory of induced innovation extends the logic of factor substitution and static efficiency to the process of technical change and attempts to show that the ‘bias’ of technical progress in agriculture will work in the same direction as factor substitution at given technology, with factor proportions changing in inverse relation to relative factor prices. This article argues that even within the model itself, the scope for rising labour productivity associated with land-saving technical progress appears to be rather limited. Econometric studies of technical change in Japanese agriculture support this view. Moreover, the theory of induced innovation tends to confuse static efficiency with ‘dynamic efficiency’ implying investments, technological progress and changing factor proportions over time. The theory of induced innovation does not identify any driving force of technical change. Therefore, it cannot explain adequately why technical progress takes place or does not take place. The article concludes by arguing that in an agriculture of poor smallholders, price control and price stabilisation rather than market-driven changes of relative factor prices are important in stimulating technical progress.

The Making of Steam Power Technology: A Study of Technical Change during the British Industrial Revolution

Writing in 1845 Friedrich Engels (and with him many other informed contemporaries) had few hesitations in pointing out the driving forces of the epochal transformation he was witnessing:The history of the proletariat in England begins with the second half of the last century, with the invention of the steam engine and the machinery for working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society; one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to be recognized.

The Organizational Impact of Technological Change: A Comparative Theory of National Institutional Factors

The organizational literature documents the upheaval that incumbent firms, across numerous industries, often experience when they confront technological change. Much of this work is based on evidence drawn from US firms. A separate literature drawn from institutional economics shows that technologies evolve differently in different countries. This may imply that incumbent and entrant firms in different countries may differ in their response to technological change. In fact, emerging comparative empirical studies of technical change in individual industries suggest that the effect of technical change upon incumbent firms is not always the same in different countries, even within the same industry. In particular, technological shifts that displace US incumbent firms in an industry often do not displace incumbent firms in Japan in the same industry. Explaining these comparative differences requires linking the institutional economics literature to the organizational literature on innovation. In particular, the ability of startup firms to exploit the opportunities of technological change accounts, in part, for the displacement of incumbent firms. Their ability in turn depends on the institutional environment, which influences the organizational constraints that incumbents and startups face in attracting people, capital, and customers. This paper offers a parsimonious theory of national institutional factors that promote or inhibit the formation of startup firms in the US and Japan. Three factors are proposed: the technical labor market, the venture capital market, and the structure of buyer-supplier ties. Complementarities between these factors cause them to work as a system, while their differences elevate or reduce the level of incentive constraints and appropriability constraints acting on incumbent and startup firms respectively. As a result, incumbents might be displaced in an industry in one country, while incumbent firms in the same industry in another country might persevere, due to the presence or absence of startup firms. This suggests that there may be no single best way to organize for innovation in different institutional settings; rather, firms must seek to exploit the virtues of their environment, even as they act to mitigate the hazards it poses.

Modes of experimentation: an innovation process—and competitive—variable

The outputs of R&D, such as new research findings and new products and services, are generated with the aid of specialized problem-solving processes. These processes are somewhat arcane and have been largely ignored in studies of technical change. However, their improvement can significantly affect the kinds of research problems that can be addressed, the efficiency and speed with which R&D can be performed, and the competitive positions of firms employing them. In this paper, we first describe the general nature of the trial-and-error problem-solving processes and strategies for experimentation used in the development of new products and services. We next discuss the rapid advances being made in problem-solving methods, and the impact such advances can have on the competitive position of adopting firms. Finally, we offer a detailed case study of the impact one novel experimental method, combinatorial chemistry, is having on the economics of the drug discovery process.

Impulse and diffusion in the study of technical change

A common model of innovation diffusion is extended to incorporate the interaction of demand growth and capacity growth, building in part on work by Kuznets and Burns on industrial growth and retardation. It is shown how price and production cost evolve during a diffusion process, and how Schumpeter's theory of the transient nature of innovator's profits has a natural place within the analysis of diffusion. The framework is intended to assist future analysis of the links between the diffusion and the evolution of a given technology, taking account of, eg, learning by doing, production bottlenecks and the inducement to innovation, and producer/adopter interaction to improve technological performance.

The Study of Culture at a Distance: A Prototype

IT IS EXCEEDINGLY DIFFICULT TODAY, more than 30 years later, to recover the elan with which, in 1947, we began work as members of Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures. Contrary to the accepted view of how anthropologists should do research, many of us had already worked for several years on cultures we had no way of approaching in person. Now we felt vindicated in making the attempt. The future was openand there was so much to do. The research about which I am writing here has been known by various names, depending in part on the context of the discussion. It has been called the study of culture at a distance (Mead and Metraux 1953), the study of national character (Gorer 1953; Mead 1951c, 195h3b), the study of national culture, and as it was conceived in the initial research design developed by Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and others, research in contemporary cultures. By whatever name, the research has been concerned centrally with the delineation of regularities in culture patterns and in the character structure of members of a culture through work with individual identified informants and with the available resources of a complex contemporary society as these may be analyzed within an anthropological frame of reference. Carried out at a distance from the living society, the research was seen as a first-stage exploration, to be followed where this was possible by fieldwork (Mead 1953a). Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures (RCC), which continued for four years, 1947-51, was the prototype. There were successor projects in which members of the original research group took part; the research methods explored in RCC were used, and the idea of uncovering cultural regularities was a principal aim. These were Studies in Soviet Culture (SSC) and Studies in Contemporary Cultures (SCC), which included separate projects on the Soviet Union and on Germany; both were carried out under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History, although with different sources of funds. The Soviet studies were directed by Margaret Mead; the German study was carried out jointly by Nelly Schargo Hoyt and myself. At further remove was a medically oriented project, Studies in Human Ecology-China, under the direction of Harold Wolff, at Cornell University Medical College. At still further remove was a study of technical change, directed by Margaret Mead, sponsored by the World Federation for Mental Health and funded by UNESCO; its only product was the book, Cultural Patterns and Technical Change (Mead 1953c). Here, however, I shall discuss only the prototype research.