Innovation and industrialization: a long-term comparison

This article aims to link the micro-level changes in firms, as the source of production behavior, with meso-level changes in industrial structure and macro-level changes in growth and development performance. It focuses on the three great industrial revolutions of the last quarter of the present millennium. These differed among themselves in almost every major way, which inhibits generalization but shows that systems (here the “national systems of production”) are very different, and that “convergence” of a later industrializing country upon its predecessor is improbable. Each industrial revolution possesses considerable internal logic but is less flexible in regard to adopting features of its successor. As a result, mismatches arise over time between the specified constituents of the production systems, as demonstrated by economic phenomena such as unemployment and political phenomena such as ideology. The task of resolving such mismatches has fallen back on the micro level of firms and households, which itself has imposed serious strains on the productive system. Such heterogeneity imposes severe limitations on the ability to link technological forecasting and social change in the long term