Contingent knowledge and technology development

It is widely recopnized that many different opes and forms of knowledge contribute to technology development. Formal codified knowledge, tacit knowledge, informal knowledge and cultural knowledge have all recently been addressed. However, one other particular form of knowledge—the contribution of knowledge/information embodied in the working context—has not been directly or explicitly addressed to the same extent. Tet this form of knowledge—'contingent knowledge'—it is argued, plays a crucial but under-appreciated role in technology development and innovation. In this paper, the concept of contingent knowledge is further explicated and illustrated by means of examples, and the strategic and practical implications are drawn out.     

A contribution to forecast theory

The overall basis of forecasting can be stated as a relation between the projection of the known values of the present and the uncertainty of the future. Information and uncertainty factors have been quantified by the “choice of alternatives” concept used in information theory. There is a strong analogy between information theory and the sum of squares equations used in regression. The regression equations can also be expressed in terms of information and uncertainty. The analogy is used as a background explanation for the relation between the length of the backcast and the confidence in the forecast. The relation is shown by the loss of confidence in the standard interval at the mean of the backcast time to the interval at forecast time. Confidence curves and tables are shown for the normal and t distributions using the 90% confidence interval as projected to various future times. Other intervals can be computed by changing the t value. The last part is a brief discussion of confidence envelopes for three and four dimensions.     

Assessing the technology contribution to value added

Technology and knowledge are two key components for economic growth; however, the two concepts are not consensually defined. This paper proposes a model to assess and quantify the technology contribution to the value-adding process. The methodological approach implied building an operational concept for technology that is independent of the concepts of knowledge and capital. As such, technology could be interpreted and quantified as an input parameter in a new production model. This model interprets and assesses, separately, the value contributions of the uses of technology, of knowledge and of capital in a production process, defining the Technology Index for that process. The model is applied to manufacturing sectors of seven European countries, quantifying their respective dependences on technology. A comparison of the Technology Index proposed here is made with the OECD's Technology Intensity factor, arguing that the former reflects the technology dependence better that the latter. Accordingly, a criterion for classifying the economic sectors' dependence on technology is proposed. A main contribution from this study is an objective classification criterion for technology dependence of firms and economic sectors. It also provides an easy benchmark procedure for knowledge and capital dependence between firms and sectors.     

Integrating fuzzy-set theory into technology roadmap development to support decision-making

Technology roadmap has long been regarded as a useful tool for linking business to technologies. Accordingly, establishing the relationships between market, product and technology elements is an essential part of successful technology roadmap development. Despite the significance as of analysing such relationships, however, few previous attempts have been made to address this issue. To overcome the limitations of previous studies, therefore, this study focused on the relationships between the diverse roadmap layers and aimed to develop a decision-support tool to investigate these relationships. To this end, fuzzy inference was applied to determine the relative importance of link between the roadmap elements, considering the degree of significance as well as the degree of relationship between the two. This study is expected to contribute to the existing roadmap literature by emphasising the value of relationship analysis, and can also be useful in practice by improving the quality of information on technology roadmap.     

Towards a disequilibrium theory of structural dynamics: Goodwin's contribution

In this paper, we reconstruct the complex itinerary towards the solution of a conceptual and mathematical problem, how to obtain growth and fluctuations in a framework where structural change is an endogenous, though intermittent, phenomenon and irregularity a natural dynamic property. This has been Goodwin's life-long research program, driven by the effort of marrying Poincaré's qualitative approach to dynamical systems with the earliest (and some of the later) attempts to formalise economic structure as a set of interacting economic units, i.e. the cells of the modern cellular dynamics. This eventually led him to computational dynamics. Our interpretation integrates the more conventional one that emphasises conceptual connections with the thoughts of Marx, Schumpeter and Keynes. Focussing upon modelling issues of an apparently pure technical nature permits a comparison of Goodwin's evolving views with those that have emerged more recently in dynamics, e.g. in the real business cycle and endogenous theories of growth. In a brief assessment towards the end of the paper, it is argued that while there is still much to be done along the path he chose, Goodwin left enough indications for us to know in which direction to go.     

System strategies: application of technology and national systems of innovation theory to the case of australian rural research and development

Recent research has examined 'systems' o f innovation at the 'national' and 'technology' levels. This paper examines the efficiency and complementarity of these approaches through consideration of Australian rural research and development. Australian rural research and development underwent a period of sustained organizational and managerial charge during the 1980s and ear& 1990s. Much of that change has been surrounded by controvercy, due to the nature ofthe reforms that haze been implemented in the sector. The transition from a scattered and disparate research effort prior to 1985, to an effort which is today highly structured, commodity specific and strategically oriented, raises a number of issues concerning the processes used, the motirlation for the change and the manner in which change has been accomplished, The systems approaches of Nelson, Lundvall and Carlsson are used in this paper to examine the reforms that have been experienced in the sector. In so doing, the paper assesses their value as methods of empirical analyses, as well as proriding explanations of change as it has been experienced in the Australian research and development community to move beyond the somewhat restricted investigations of the past.     

The impact of the Interaction between institutional quality and aid volatility on growth: theory and evidence

We analyze both theoretically and empirically, the effect of aid volatility and its interaction effect with institutional quality on per capita economic growth. Our theoretical model, in which an aid-recipient government, operating in an institutional environment of some given quality (making choices over the distribution of aid), predicts that a negative effect of aid volatility on growth is mitigated by stronger institutional quality. We use panel data covering the period 1984–2004 for 78 countries to test this theoretical prediction. Using Generalised Methods of Moments (GMM) we find the relationship between growth and aid volatility is significantly negative and depends on institutional quality. Our baseline results are robust to various computations of aid volatility and foreign aid, time periods, sub-samples and additional covariates.     

Population,food, and knowledge: a simple unified growth theory

This paper provides a unified growth theory, i.e. a model that explains the very long-run economic and demographic development path of industrialized economies, stretching from the pre-industrial era to the present-day and beyond. Making strict use of Malthus’ (An essay on the principle of population. London, printed for J. Johnson, 1798) so-called preventive check hypothesis—that fertility rates vary inversely with the price of food—the current study offers a new and straightforward explanation for the demographic transition and the break with the Malthusian era. Employing a two-sector framework with agriculture and industry, we demonstrate how fertility responds differently to productivity and income growth, depending on whether it emerges in agriculture or industry. Agricultural productivity and income growth makes food goods, and therefore children, relatively less expensive. Industrial productivity and income growth, on the other hand, makes food goods, and therefore children, relatively more expensive. The present framework lends support to existing unified growth theories and is well in tune with historical evidence about structural transformation.      

Towards a kernel theory of external knowledge integration for high-tech firms: Exploring a failed theory test

Designing information systems (ISs) requires a thorough understanding of the organizational knowledge processes in which these systems are used. Although much is known about internal organizational knowledge processes, the understanding of external knowledge processes is less developed. Hence, this paper reflects an attempt to operationalize and test a model of the process of external knowledge integration (EKI), consisting of an identification, acquisition, and utilization stage. We utilize high-technology based firms from a variety of high-tech categories including nanotechnology based firms since these firms have critical knowledge integration needs. The results of an international survey, with responses of 317 high-tech companies, suggest that not these three EKI-stages, but four organizational effectiveness functions (goal attainment, pattern maintenance, adaptation, and integration) account for most variation in responses. These findings seem to imply that ISs that are to support the EKI-process should be designed according to organizational effectiveness functions rather than to EKI-stages. It is proposed that each organizational effectiveness function imposes different requirements on ISs because users interact differently with IS in each function.     

企业知识理论浅议

人类社会正从后工业经济时代进入知识经济时代。在这个以知识和信息的生产、分配、传播和使用为基础的全新的经济形态,知识正取代资本成为时代最稀缺的资源。企业的生产要素投入——已不是简单的物理形态,而是更高级的知识的形态。换而言之,是知识而不是资本成为企业的最关键投入要素。企业的竞争优势源泉也将从原来的有形的物的形态转向无形的知识形态。时代在变革,企业理论也应反映这种变革。随着知识经济时代的到来,企业理论也正从传统以交易成本为基础的企业理论向以知识为基础的企业理论演变,从而使企     

A contribution to the theory and empirics of Schumpeterian growth with worldwide interactions

This paper proposes an integrated theoretical and methodological framework characterized by technological interactions to explain growth processes from a Schumpeterian perspective. Global interdependence implied by international R&D spillovers needs to be taken into account in both the theoretical and empirical models. For this task, spatial econometrics is the appropriate tool. The econometric model we propose includes the neoclassical growth model as a particular case. We can therefore explicitly test the role of R&D investment in the long-run growth process against the Solow growth model. Finally, the properties of our spatial econometric specification allow the explicit evaluation of the impact of home and foreign R&D spillovers.     

A contribution to duality theory,applied to the measurement of risk aversion

This paper determines the precise connection between the curvature properties of an objective function and the ray-curvature properties of its dual. When the objective function is interpreted as a Bernoulli or cardinal utility function, our results characterize the relationship between an agent’s attitude towards income risks and her attitude towards risks in the underlying consumption space. We obtain these results by developing and applying a number of representation theorems for concave functions.The work of Juan E. Martínez-Legaz has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology and the FEDER, project BEC2002-00642, and by the Departament d’Universitats, Recerca i Societat de la Informació, Direcció General de Recerca de la Generalitat de Catalunya, project 2001SGR-00162. He also thanks the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA for its support. John Quah would like to acknowledge with gratitude the financial support of the ESRC (grant number R000271171). He would also like to thank the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley, whose hospitality he enjoyed while completing this project. Both authors would like to thank Simon Cowan for pointing the way to some important references. They are also very grateful to the referee whose insightful suggestions led to a much improved paper     

Agricultural productivity and economic development: the contribution of clover to structural transformation in Denmark

This paper contributes to the debate on the impact of agricultural productivity on long run economic development. It presents evidence that widespread adoption of clover contributed to local economic development based on a panel of 56 Danish market towns. We adopt a differences-in-differences approach augmented by an instrumental variable and find that the adoption of clover accounts for about 8 percent of the growth in market town population from 1672 to 1901. The analysis suggests that the effect of the adoption of clover on the process of development was mediated by its impact on human capital formation.     

On the predictability of knowledge formation: The tortuous link between regional specialization trade, and development

This paper examines the relation between industrial mix, trade, and regional productivity growth. For this purpose, a dynamic model of the open economy with diversified sectoral knowledge formation and incomplete interregional knowledge diffusion is constructed. The theoretical framework is first used to show the consequences of increasing globalization on regional growth. It is then applied to German regional data in order to investigate whether there is evidence of generally specified patterns of knowledge formation. It emerges that some causal relationships are robust for the case of German regions but cannot be exploited by economic policy in general.     

The contribution of Gerald Shove to the development of Cambridge Economics

Frank Gerald Shove was a close friend of Keynes and the other protagonists of the economic debates in Cambridge during the 1920s and 1930s. Shove's influence on those debates is not well documented because he published little and had all his notes destroyed after his death. This paper looks at Shove's most significant contributions to the debates of the 1930s. Attention is concentrated on the debates over increasing returns and imperfect competition. Shove emphasized the complexity of economic phenomena and the need to develop tools to deal with it. He found his analytical and methodological inspiration in Marshall's work. This position led him to clash with younger economists, in particular Joan Robinson, whose work on imperfect competition and whose efforts to achieve rigorous and ‘precise’ results failed, in his view, to capture the working of actual markets. The final section of the paper discusses the similarity of Shove's methodological outlook to that of Keynes. Both were well aware of the need to go beyond Marshall, but they wanted to retain the richness, complexity and realism of Marshall's approach.     

Quantitative analysis on the contribution of industrial structure change to sustainable development： a case study of Fujian Province

Development and sustainability are the core connotation of sustainable development. Sustainability of economic development and the provision capability of resources and environment are two aspects of sustainable development. The former ones are the foundation of the latter ones＇. Industrial structure has a close relationship with sustainable development. The optimization of industrial structure is the important base for the sustainable development of modern economy and also the important ways of the sustainable utilization of resources and environment; The intensive growth effect of industrial structure change has the meaning of sustainable development. This paper reviews and explains the theory on the contribution of indus＇trial structure change to sustainable development, builds the calculation model through introducing the coefficient of industrial structure change, makes an empirical study on the contribution of industrial structure change to sustainable development in Fujian, and puts forward ways and policies of optimizing industrial structure both among industries and inside the industry in the process of industrial structure change.     

The growth of knowledge: Testing a theory of scientific revolutions with a formal model

Modern theories of science emphasize scientific revolutions rather than the traditional cumulative view of scientific progress. Thomas Kuhn, in particular, has formulated a theory of science based on the lifecycle of paradigms. Though Kuhn's theory is attractive, no calculus is offered by which the theory can be tested. This study tests the dynamic consistency of Kuhn's theory by formalizing the theory and testing it with a computer simulation model. The model plays the roles of the actors, tracing out the consequences of their day-to-day actions. Sensitivity tests are used to explore the importance of various hypotheses. Results show the theory to be dynamically consistent: The lifecycle of paradigms described by Kuhn can be accounted for by Kuhn's theory. Kuhn's theory thus passes a test to which few other theories of science have been subjected. The study shows how modeling can provide a method for testing theories even when those theories are stated entirely in qualitative terms, at a high level of abstraction, and in a context divorced from explicit dynamic analysis.