Guide to the Literature

Innovation is not a new phenomenon. Arguably, it is as old as mankind itself. There seems to be something inherently ‘‘human’’ about the tendency to think about new and better ways of doing things and to try them out in practice. Without it, the world inwhichwe livewould look very, very diVerent. Try for amoment to think of a world without airplanes, automobiles, telecommunications, and refrigerators, just to mention a few of the more important innovations from the not-too-distant past. Or—from an even longer perspective—where would we be without such fundamental innovations as agriculture, the wheel, the alphabet, or printing? In spite of its obvious importance, innovation has not always received the scholarly attention it deserves. For instance, students of long-run economic change used to focus on factors such as capital accumulation or the working of markets, rather than on innovation. This is now changing. Research on the role of innovation in economic and social change has proliferated in recent years, particularly within the social sciences, andwith a bent towards cross-disciplinarity. In fact, as illustrated in Figure 1.1, in recent years the number of social-science publications focusing on innovation has increased much faster than the total number of such publications.