Technological Opportunity and Growth

The article presents a model of technological opportunity, modeled as a resource that is exhaustible in the short run but renewable in the long run. The exploitation and regeneration of technological opportunity is the result of an interplay between intentional incremental and radical innovations and unintentionally made discoveries. The setting for the basic model is a multidimensional metric space where existing ideas are convexly combined in order to create new ideas. When the basic set theoretical features are included in a long-run R&D model, we derive the implications for paradigm duration as well as for the growth rate of technological knowledge. We show that whereas a larger pool of R&D workers have an ambiguous effect on the short run technological growth rate, it will lead to more frequent paradigm shifts in the long run.JEL classification: O31, O41* I am particularly indebted to Joel Mokyr for an extensive discussion on an earlier draft. I have also received valuable comments from Marcus Asplund, Wlodek Bursztyn, Douglas Hibbs, Lennart Hjalmarsson, Charlie Karlsson, Susanna Lundström, Joakim Persson, Paul Segerstrom, Fabrizio Zilibotti, Lars-Erik Öller, two referees, the editor of this journal, and from seminar participants at the EEAMeeting in Lausanne, Göteborg University, IIES at Stockholm University, Stockholm School of Economics, and FIEF. Generous financial support has been granted by the Wallander-Hedelius Foundation.     

Narrating Crisis,Constructing Policy: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in Syria

During crises, ideas play a decisive role in shaping radical paradigm shifts in economic governance. However, not all crises immediately produce such ‘great transformations’. Why do some ideas result in incremental rather than abrupt change after crisis? To identify mechanisms potentially explaining this variation, I conduct an exploratory process tracing of an understudied case of incremental institutional change: post-independence Syria. Competing political actors in Syria converged on identical policy responses to crisis despite their very different interpretations of its causes. Although power oscillated between these increasingly bitter rivals in the early 1950s, their ideational consensus on economic issues nevertheless led to a decade of steady institutional change that transformed previously fragile government institutions into powerful vehicles of statism. I derive from this analysis the potential causal significance of two new variables – crisis narrative and crisis response – and hypothesise that their configuration can explain variation in post-crisis patterns of institutional change. Ideas can explain not only the new direction of economic governance after crisis, but also the speed and scale of its movement.     

Solving the matchmaking dilemma between companies and external idea contributors

Most of the innovation management literature refers to the benefits of external knowledge. It follows then that companies invest a great deal of effort and resources in developing instruments to motivate people to submit ideas; however, external contributors are often not willing to submit their ideas because they are afraid that they will not be compensated for them afterwards. Thus, the question arises as to how companies can profit from the good ideas of external contributors without being accused of intellectual property (IP) theft in cases where it already knows about the ideas being presented. For this paper, we have taken the findings from trust research into account and discuss several practical methods for overcoming the obstacles that arise when both companies and idea contributors want to profit from ideas. Finally, we develop a trust-based intermediary model for knowledge transfer in the innovation management field.     

企业知识管理与知识管理能力评价

通过对国外相关文献的分析研究,本文对企业知识及企业知识管理的内涵进行了阐释。在此基础之上,通过与专家学者和企业高层管理人员的广泛交流,提出了知识管理评价理论模型和内容框架,并设立了以度量卡作为企业知识管理能力的评估工具。最后,将此评价体系应用于企业实际测评,发现该评价工具对企业提升技术创新能力和竞争优势提供了较好的知识管理手段。     

Seize the Moment: Financial Crisis and the Making of the Finnish Competition State

In this paper we examine how Finnish Governments dismantled the Nordic welfare state paradigm from the 1990s onwards and adopted Schumpeterian ideas of a competitive workfare state. In the early 1990s, Finland went through a financial crisis that was the most severe in OECD countries since the Second World War and came to play a major role in the paradigm change. In the crisis, the Ministry of Finance gained a central role as a consensus-building power broker, and formulated a political strategy of national competitiveness, which was adopted as a rationale of power for consensual governments and has been maintained since. We suggest that financial crises can become formative moments in which new ideas are adopted and policies are reformulated. They can also become moments which provide opportunity to overcome citizen opinion. In Finland, the wide popular and party support for the Nordic welfare model was not reflected in the new paradigm.     

生态产业系统的管理理念剖析

生态产业系统是一个经济过程高效、生态功能和谐的进化型产业系统，是可持续发展战略的重要内容和保证经济增长方式转变的必由之路。本文首先通过分析生态产业系统管理的内涵和实质及层次．建立起该产业系统管理的基础；然后．通过对整体协同理念、时空理念、生态效益理念以及耦合共生理念的分析．进一步阐释了生态产业系统管理理念。最后指出只有构建这种新的理念．才能在生态产业系统管理时把握系统发展及其方向，最终实现产业系统的生态化和整个社会的可持续发展目标。     

Knowledge,coordination and the firm: Historical perspectives

Abstract

This paper illustrates the problems and processes of developing economic knowledge by a selective historical treatment of ideas about the firm. Coase thought it necessary to explain firms as organizations, but not as distinctive productive units; neither did he explain why markets exist. Chamberlin's attempt to introduce product differentiation and selling costs is compared with Allyn Young's process theory and Marshall's treatment of the firm, and inter-firm relations, as means of organizing the growth of knowledge. The firm is a decision-making system in a context of Knightian uncertainty, and Simon's concept of quasi-decomposability applies to human brains and human organizations.     

Ideas,errors and the commercialisation of valuable knowledge

This article considers unexpected outcomes of innovation occurring during research processes. Because serendipity has often led to important discoveries, here a model is developed to analyse the conditions for a ‘market for ideas’ to exist. With the help of game theory in particular, it is shown that the creation of such a market is quite unlikely because unfair buyer behaviour and the possibility of expropriation of the innovation renders the seller reluctant to negotiate with a potential buyer. All these factors may hinder the flow of ideas among institutions, generating a loss for society as a whole.     

Economic Ideas and Institutional Change: The Case of the Russian Stabilisation Fund

An intense discussion is taking place in international political economy on the influence of economic ideas on institutional change. Case studies so far have, however, mainly focused on the Western industrialised countries and research seems to be biased towards cases in which new ideas caused lasting institutional change. The present paper addresses these two shortcomings by analysing the case of the Russian Stabilisation Fund (SF). This case is an example both of the impact of global ideas on a non-Western emerging country and of a ‘near miss’ in the sense that imported neoliberal ideas failed to assert themselves enduringly. Paradoxically, it can be shown how the neoliberally based idea of the SF even contributed to the return to Soviet patterns of industrial policy. The main reason for this, we argue, is that the Fund's implementation was not preceded by economic and political debates. Accordingly, the imported institution of the SF had to be filled with ideational content after its implementation.     

The New Political Economy of the Macroprudential Ideational Shift

From late 2008 onwards, in the space of six months, international financial regulatory networks centred around the Swiss city of Basel presided over a startlingly rapid ideational shift, the significance and importance of which remains to be deciphered. From being relatively unpopular and very much on the sidelines, the idea of macroprudential regulation (MPR) moved to the centre of the policy agenda and came to represent a new Basel consensus, as the principal interpretative frame, for financial technocrats and regulators seeking to diagnose and understand the financial crisis and to advance institutional blueprints for regulatory reform. This article sets out to explain how and why that ideational shift occurred. It identifies four scoping conditions of presence, position, promotion, and plausibility, that account for the successful rise to prominence of macroprudential ideas through an insiders' coup d'état. The final section of the article argues that this macroprudential shift is an example of a ‘gestalt flip’ or third order change in Peter Hall's terms, but it is not yet a paradigm shift, because the development of first order policy settings and second order policy instruments is still ongoing, giving the macroprudential ideational shift a highly contested and contingent character.     

Random walk to innovation: Why productivity follows a power law

This paper examines a search model in which knowledge is created as rational, but poorly informed, innovators obtain new ideas from combinations of existing ideas. We assume that the productivity of an idea is stochastic and depends on the productivity of the parental ideas. Importantly, we assume that the contribution of these parents to the productivity of the final idea is enhanced by prior use of these in knowledge creation. We identify conditions on the search costs leading to two properties: 1) the tail of the distribution of the productivity of innovations is a power law, and 2) the number of citations, i.e., times an idea is used in the process of innovation, follows a displaced power law. Both these properties are consistent with the available empirical evidence on the productivity of innovations and on patent citations.     

企业知识管理的层面分析范式:一种基于CAS视角的研究

首先构建了企业知识管理的递阶层面;然后,以复杂适应系统为理论基点,阐述了层面分析范式的概念模型。研究表明,该分析范式能够更好地分析与描述企业知识管理这一复杂系统运作、创新、学习和适应等行为的本质。     

The Policy Ramifications of Capital as Ideas

In 1987, Baldwin Ranson wrote about capital and technology in economic growth. Ranson argued that capital should be defined as intangible ideas and technology that are not subject to supply and demand constraints. Thorstein Veblen (1908, 518) described his conception of capital as being “found in possession of something in the way of a body of technological knowledge, – knowledge serviceable and requisite to the quest of a livelihood.” John R. Commons (1934, 662) wrote in a similar vein that “capital is not an accumulation of past products of stored-up labor – these are transitory and aimless – capital is a going plant of industrial knowledge and experience.” More recently, Cesar Hidalgo (2015) and Paul Romer (1990, 1994) have also written about the idea of capital as ideas and the key to economic growth. Hidalgo (2015, 179) states that “the growth of information in the economy, which is ultimately the essence of economic growth, results from the coevolution of our species’ collective computation capacity.” The first section of this article explores the linkages between the older generation and more recent thinkers on the intersection of capital as technology and ideas. The second section explores the policy ramifications of this conceptualization of capital. Romer argues that temporary monopolies are needed to encourage investment in innovation. According to both Veblen and Ranson, these rules do not allow for the full social value of ideas to be utilized. The second part of this article also explores these differences using A. Allan Schmid’s situation-structure-performance (SSP) model.     

高校知识管理的内容管理及实施

为了促进知识管理在高校的应用,对高校的职能和知识管理的特点进行了剖析,结合作者多年教育背景。把高校知识管理的内容管理按教学、科研和学生管理三部分进行分解,归纳出每部分知识库的框架。并总结出了高校施行知识管理应以开放理念为前提、领导重视为保障、兼顾信息技术和人员管理、注重激励机制和资源建设等思想理念。     

Idea and goals of environmental protection and ecological construction in the 11^th five-year plan period

In this paper, the executive of the 10th Five- Year Plan in the field of environmental protection and ecological constrution is reviewed, and the charactristics of economic growth and its environmental impact on the 11^th Five-Year Plan is forecasted and analyzed. A principal idea of eavironmental protection and ecological construction is put forward for the 11^th Five-Year Plan pertod： strensgthen the point treatment in key areas and set the main targets based on the idea. The relating countermeasures in national level are proposed as follows： set up appropriate ideas for official achievements by launching resources and environmental cost acconting; adjust the industrial struacture actively by industrial policies and strenuous work; develop circular economy, change the mode of environmental protecgon from end treatment to headstream and proeess control： strengthen the market mechanism in the process of pollution treatment, set up the system of ＂who treats who benefits＂ ; perfect interrelated laws and standards, strengthen the ability of environmental munagement; lay extra emphasis on two key targets： water pollution tretment in key river basins and management of the reserves; and combine the ecological consnuction and poverty alleviation in higher level.     

Knowledge externalities,innovation and growth in European countries: the role of institutions

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the linkages between institutions and economic growth in the European context and highlights innovation as the intermediate variable that drives this interplay. Building on the literature in the evolutionary approach to the economics of innovation and in the economic growth theory with a political economic perspective, we assume that knowledge externalities can fully take place where institutions guarantee a level playing field in the access to knowledge. We estimate the effects of a set of relevant institutional variables on the growth rate of technological knowledge and per capita GDP for a sample of European countries. The empirical analysis confirms that institutions that tend to equalise opportunities to innovate significantly amplify the impact of an exogenous increase in the knowledge base on the growth rate of per capita GDP.     

知识与信息:学习成本与交易成本

对文献梳理和分析的结果显示:随着对知识和信息认识的深入,交易成本理论不足以解释知识转移过程中所发生的成本问题;不管是隐性知识,还是显性知识,都不等同于信息;知识的获取过程是一个学习过程,既需要耗费时间,也需要消耗资源,从而构成学习成本。交易成本理论以信息不对称假设替代了新古典经济学的知识与信息均匀分布假设,并引发了所谓的"信息范式";而在知识不对称且信息不对称假设下所探讨的学习成本概念,则意味着对隐性知识显性化、SECI模型、企业核心能力、战略联盟、产业集群以及国际间技术转移组织形式等问题的研究,将拥有一个逻辑一致的经济学基础。     

中国式管理的灵魂

中国式管理问题,是近年来学术界研究的热点。从中华民族五千年历史文化挖掘中产生的种种管理创新理论层出不穷,但对于究竟什么是中国式管理,各执一言,一时尚未能形成一个系统的理论体系。本文认为,要进行有中国特色管理科学的创新发展,首先必须明确有中国特色的管理理念。因为,管理首先是一种理念,一定的管理理念是特定管理的指南或灵魂。我国古代的和合思想就是在特定的历史条件下形成的历史精华,由中国传统文化生成的和合理念,是中国传统管理的精神支柱,也是今天我们创新发展中国式管理的指南和灵魂。     

中国高新技术产业集群知识外部性效应分析

近年来,中国科技体制改革取得重大成就,国家高新技术产业快速发展。知识外部性作为产业集群发展的驱动因素,其在创新生态系统中的溢出效应日益受到学者的重视。以91个城市国家级高新技术产业开发区为研究对象,对其知识外部性的Mar效应和Jac效应进行测度,并给出国家高新技术产业集群知识外部性的辐射范围,定量计算知识外部性对经济增长和技术进步的效应。结果表明:中国高新技术产业集聚过程中产业内知识溢出效应更大,西部地区高新技术产业集群Jac外部性对于区域经济增长更具有显著的正向作用。研究的创新点在于,同时兼论了Mar效应和Jac效应,将样本划分为东部、中部、西部和东北部进行测度和分析,研究结论更具有区域针对性。     

从技术知识观到技术演化观:一种新的分析范式

技术知识观是目前技术分析的主流范式,但仍有不少严重缺陷。技术演化观虽然还有诸多分歧和争论,却已经表现出强大的理论整合力和现实解释力,也直接契合了自然科学革命性的进展和哲学的发展方向,主流分析范式从技术知识观转变为技术演化观是理论发展的必然趋势。