Innovation, complexity and economic evolution

If evolutionary economics is to compete with neoclassical economics as a general-purpose economic theory, it needs to incorporate new aspects of socioeconomic reality, such as institutions of all types, including technical, scientific, and political. Furthermore, evolutionary economics needs to be able to provide policy implications at least as interesting as those of neoclassical economics. Thus, as this book argues, evolutionary economics must become evolutionary political economy.
Innovation plays a central role in the book, but not in the sense of providing a technologically determinist interpretation. Rather, the book argues that innovations do not emerge in isolation from other components of socioeconomic systems but coevolve with institutions, infrastructures and organizational forms. This concept of coevolution is absolutely central in the book and provides a link with theories of complexity. In addition to providing an epistemological basis for evolutionary economics, the link with complexity and coevolution offers the connection with evolutionary political economy. Innovations and technologies do not emerge and develop in an institutional vacuum, but interact with existing institutions and reshape them, in addition to inducing the formation of new institutions. In this process, technologies and institutions reinforce each other providing a potential mechanism to transform socioeconomic systems. The book also explores the policy implications of these innovative societies, where wealth is created but unequally distributed.
The book is addressed to open-minded economists, social scientists who are dissatisfied with the approach of neoclassical economics, technologists and policy makers.

Pier Paolo Saviotti has been Research Professor in the Grenoble unit of INRA (now INRAE), the National Institute of Agricultural Research of France, and in GREDEG CNRS in Sophia Antipolis. He taught in the Departments of Science and Technology Policy and of Economics of Manchester University (1980-1994) and in Universidad del Zulia, Venezuela. He has been Visiting Professor in the University of Jena (2002-2003), in Rand Afrikaans University (now University of Johannesburg) in 2004, in the University of Hohenheim in 2010-2011, in the Technological University of Eindhoven in 2012-2013 Utrecht university (2015-2017). In 2012 he was research fellow in the Institute of Advanced Studies of Durham University. Between January 2015 and December 2017, he has been visiting Professor in Innovation Studies, Copernicus Institute, Utrecht University. He is now Affiliate Professor, Economics Department, St Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, and associate researcher in GREDEG CNRS, Sophia Antipolis. Between July 2008 and July 2012, he has been vice-president of the International Schumpeter Society.

Saviotti is author of several publications about the economics of innovation, of development and the economics of knowledge.