Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in 20th-Century America - Softcover

Mowery, David C.; Rosenberg, Nathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521646537 ISBN 13: 9780521646536

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1999

Synopsis

The first digital electronic computer, the ENIAC, was over 100 feet long, with 18,000 simultaneously functioning vacuum tubes. Now virtually every business and home in America has its own compact PC. In 1903 the Wright brothers' airplane, held together with baling wire and glue, traveled a couple hundred yards. Today fleets of streamlined jets transport millions of people per day to cities worldwide. Between discovery and application, between invention and widespread use, there is a world of innovation, of tinkering and improvements and adaptations. This is the world David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg map out in Paths of Innovation, a tour of the intersecting routes of the technological.

About this title

About the Author:

Jan Fagerberg is Professor at the University of Oslo, where he is affiliated with the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture (TIK). David C. Mowery is Milton W. Terrill Professor of Business at the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. His academic
awards include the Raymond Vernon Prize from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, the Economic History Association's Fritz Redlich Prize, the Business History Review's Newcomen Prize, and the Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award. Richard R. Nelson is a Professor at the School of
International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, New York

From Library Journal:

This small volume details the laborious, painstaking ways in which technological innovation occurs in America, focusing on the development of four giants: the internal combustion engine, chemicals, electric power, and the electronics revolution. Mowery and Rosenberg, coauthors of Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth (Cambridge Univ., 1989), are particularly interested here in the "intense period of imaginative design" that lies between the scientific idea and the ultimate product in a particular field. This somewhat scholarly though nonetheless readable work, loaded with not-too-cumbersome footnotes, citations, tables, and graphs, includes ample discussion of the role of universities and the federal government in the research and development (R&D) that led to the success of the four giants, as well as the general importance of R&D in a technological society. Recommended for academic libraries.?Robert Ballou, Atlanta, GA.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0521646537
• ISBN 13: 9780521646536
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 228