Waves of Innovation

In my last post I was trying to describe an analogy between technological innovations cycle and the Scientific revolutions cycle. Recently, I have found out that some of elements of this analogy have already been described in an article by Giovanni Dosi (1982): "Technological paradigms and technological trajectories: A suggested interpretation of the determinants and directions of technical change".

In the paper the author also stressed the similarity of the procedures and the nature of “technologies” with those of sciencentific research. In particular, the author coined a new term: “technological paradigms” (or research programmes) that are performing a similar role to the “scientific paradigms” (or research programmes) and proposed a model based on this similarity.

The model Dosi proposed, tries to account for both continuous changes and discontinuities in technological innovation. Continuous changes are often related to progress along some technological trajectory which defined by a technological paradigm, while discontinuities are associated with the emergence of a new paradigm (Paradigm shift). Dosi claim that the origin of a new tecnological paradigm stems from the interplay between scientific advances, economic factors, institutional variables, and unsolved difficulties on established technological paths.

The differentiation between continuous innovation and discontinuous innovation may be positive for understanding initiation of a new paradigm as well as position and diffusion of a specific technology or knowledge. For example, the figure below (Hargroves and Smith (2005)) shows six waves of Sci-Tech innovation between 1785-2020, which can also be regarded as six different paradigms. A continuous innovation is what happened in the same wave, while discontinuous innovation is the jump from one wave to the next wave.

Sources

Dosi, G. (1982): Technological paradigms and technological trajectories: A suggested interpretation of the determinants and directions of technical change, Research Policy, 11 (3), pp.147-162.

http://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/respol/v22y1993i2p102-103.html#abstract

The Natural Advantage of Nations: business opportunities, innovation, and governance in the 21st century. K Hargroves, MH Smith (2005). page 17