Technology Infrastructure

Technology infrastructure supports the design, deployment and use of both individual technology-based components and the systems of such components that form the knowledge-based economy. As such, it plays a central role in the innovation process and in the promotion of the diffusion of technologies. Thus, it is an important element contributing to the operation of innovation systems and innovation performance in any modern economy.

Technology infrastructure, either in the narrow or broad sense, is not well understood as an element of a sector’s technology platform or of a national innovation system. Similarly misunderstood are the processes by which such infrastructure is embodied in standards or diffused through various institutional frameworks. In fact, because of the public and quasi-public good nature of technology infrastructure, firms as well as public-sector agencies under invest in it, thus inhibiting long-term technological advancement and economic growth.

This volume of essays brings together a collection of papers from eminent scholars on all of the various dimensions of technology infrastructure mentioned above. To our knowledge, it is the first such collection of papers and we expect this scholarship to become the foundation for future research in this area.

This book was published as a special issue of Economics of Innovation and New Technology.

Cristiano Antonelli is chair professor of economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Torino and Director of the graduate programme of the School of Economics of Institutions and Creativity. He is the managing editor of Economics of Innovation and New Technology and an associate editor of Information Economics and Policy.

Albert N. Link is professor of economics at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA.

Stan Metcalfe is Emeritus Professor at University of Manchester, Visiting Professor at the Curtin University of Technology and University of Queensland, and Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Business Research at Cambridge University.