Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy

Book Description

Traditional growth theory emphasizes the incentives for capital accumulation rather than technological progress. Innovation is treated as an exogenous process or a by-product of investment in machinery and equipment. Grossman and Helpman develop a unique approach in which innovation is viewed as a deliberate outgrowth of investments in industrial research by forward-looking, profit-seeking agents.

Gene M. Grossman is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Elhanan Helpman is Archie Sherman Professor of International Economic Relations at Tel Aviv University.

Customer Reviews:

a very useful synthesis of trade and growth theory.......2000-11-09

This volume is a very useful synthesis of trade and growth theory, pulling together a lot of related models and presenting them in a systematic manner with unified notation. One is struck at the end how much the results turn on traditional differences in factor usage intensities across industries, and as a consequence, how non-robust many the results are in a prescriptive sense.

Creative Destruction: Business Survival Strategies in the Global Internet Economy

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Interesting reading and analytic edge
schumpeter revisited
A thoughtful and highly useful book
A Lego Box of Valuable Ideas
A Multi-Dimensional Examination of a Basic Concept

Creative Destruction: Business Survival Strategies in the Global Internet Economy

Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

More than fifty years ago, Joseph Schumpeter stated that processes intrinsic to a capitalist society produce a "creative destruction," whereby innovations destroy obsolete technologies, only to be assaulted in turn by newer and more efficient rivals. This book asks whether the current chaotic state of the telecommunications and related Internet industries is evidence of creative destruction, or simply a result of firms, governments, and others wasting valuable resources with limited benefits to society as a whole. In telecommunications, for example, wireless, IP, and cable-based technologies are all fighting for a share of the market currently dominated by older, circuit-switched, copper-terminated networks. This process is accompanied by mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, and investment and divestment in worldwide markets.

The selections discuss the primary challenge facing firms, governments, and other players: how to exploit the opportunities created by such destructive dynamics. They highlight the importance of national regulations promoting competition and nonmonopolistic market structures, as well as the role of new technologies such as the Internet in driving down the price and speeding the diffusion of innovative products and services in telecommunications, media, electronic retailing, and other "new economy" industries.

Customer Reviews:

Interesting reading and analytic edge.......2001-11-08

It is a thorough analysis of the technological advances of our era and the depth of the internet industry. I was particularly interested in the implications for Latin America and the technological transfer from liberalization. It is a useful book for practictioners and for more academic minds.

schumpeter revisited.......2001-07-19

Creative Destruction presents a fascinating revival of an old concept in the context of recent technological developments and innovation. It offers a brilliant account of how information technologies accelerate the process of creative destruction today and helps understand how information society articulates with in a wider framework of economic history. Those interested in Latin America will appreciate, in particluar, the recent developments in the telecommunications industry in the region.

A thoughtful and highly useful book.......2001-07-10

This is an outstanding collection of articles. These papers combine scholarly depth with usefulness for practitioners. They will help you understand where we've been and forecast where we are going with the Internet. I teach courses on Internet Business Strategy and will use this collection next year. My favorites are Baumol's "Innovation and Creative Destruction; McKnight's "Internet Business Models: Creative Destruction as Usual" and Lehr's "A New Theory of the Internet Firm." They provide a solid conceptual basis for understanding the implications of the Internet economy. One thing truly unique about this book is the thoughtful and detailed discussions of the implications of the Internet on international business. There are six papers that focus on these issues. I have not seen this anywhere else. In a world where people publish books peddling derivative nostrums about the network economy, it's a pleasure to finally find one that deals with these issues in a serious, thoughtful and, most of all, useful way.

A Lego Box of Valuable Ideas.......2001-05-08

Rather than focusing on a single angle and building a long argument in its favor, this compendium's treatment of diverse dimensions of creative destruction lets the reader paint his or her own picture of the net effects of Schumpeter's famous concept. The book's 11 articles touch on topics as diverse as the future of telecommunications firms in a Net-centric world, the impact of regulatory reform on the Internet in Europe, the institutional barriers to Internet-driven creative destruction in Japan, and the impact of open-source software business models.

Creative Destruction is a Lego-box of interesting ideas that managers and academics can recombine into constructs valuable to their work, teaching, or research. I found it very rich reading.

A Multi-Dimensional Examination of a Basic Concept.......2001-04-13

There are three recent publications with the same title (Creative Destruction) whose authors correlate Joseph Schumpeter's concept of "creative destruction" with the contemporary business world. Foster and Kaplan explain "why companies that are built to last underperform the market -- and how to successfully transform them" whereas in their work, Nolan and Croson offer "a six-stage process for transforming the organization." In the third volume co-edited by McKnight, Vaaler, and Katz, various authors and co-authors of 13 anthologized essays examine various "business survival strategies for the global Internet economy." I highly recommend all three volumes as well as two of Schumpeter's works: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, and, Essays: On Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles, and the Evolution of Capitalism.

This book grew out of a symposium held at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the spring of 1999. The topic was "Creative Destruction -- or Just Destruction?" Those who presented papers were asked to address "the key technological, regulatory, organizational, and competitive dynamics compelling change in the way firms and stakeholders do business in an increasingly global and Internet-centric society." At the symposium there were (and in this volume there are) four points which are consistent with the theme of "creative destruction":

The Destruction of Traditional Industry Structures

The Destruction of Traditional Regulatory Structures

The Destruction of Traditional Competitive Positioning Strategies

The Destruction of Traditional Technological Assumptions

It is important to keep in mind that this is not a manual. Although there are numerous suggestions, checklists, points of emphasis, graphic illustrations, and examples offered, the volume's primary purpose is to stimulate continued discussion and debate on the major challenges now facing firms, governments, and other players -- while suggesting "how to exploit the new opportunities created by creative dynamics."

The material is organized within five Parts: Introduction, Theory and Practice of Creative Destruction, The Global Context for Creative Destruction, Business Destruction Strategies in the Global Internet Economy, and Creative Business Survival Strategies. For the reader's convenience, the editors offer brief comments about each subject and about each of those who address it. After reading the excellent Introduction, you may decide not to read the everything that follows from beginning to end. In that event, select what is directly relevant to your and your organization's most immediate and urgent needs and interests. (In all probability, some of those needs and interests will soon change.) The editors provide three supplementary sections (Contributors, Notes, and References) which assist and encourage further study as well as "continued discussion and debate."

Book Description

The exceptional impact of free market globalization on CIS countries and the use of innovation to counter the concomitant socioeconomic problems are profoundly and frankly analyzed and discussed from a variety of standpoints, both cultural and geographical. New possible solutions are presented and discussed, leading to a proposal for the development of a `common technological language'. Audience: A high level reference text for experts and organizations interested in economic problems and forecasting, which underscores the technological aspects and the cultural revolution needed for advanced, high quality manufacturing and service sectors. Of interest to experts in both technology and economics.

Perspectives on a global economy: Technology, productivity, and growth : U.S. and German issues (Report / The Conference Board)

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Perspectives on a global economy: Technology, productivity, and growth : U.S. and German issues (Report / The Conference Board)
Robert H McGuckin
Manufacturer: Conference Board
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: 0823706559

The Power of Management Capital : Utilizing the New Drivers of Innovation, Profitability and Growth in a Demanding Global Economy

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NEW PERSPECTIVE ON MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP.

The Power of Management Capital : Utilizing the New Drivers of Innovation, Profitability and Growth in a Demanding Global Economy
Armand Feigenbaum , and Donald Feigenbaum
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0070217335

Book Description

From the man whom BusinessWeek has called a "founding father" and the "hands-on implementer" of the Quality Movement comes a breakthrough approach to management and leadership

Just as Armand Feigenbaum's pioneering Total Quality Control changed the world's approach to quality and productivity, The Power of Management Capital will also transform the contemporary business landscape.

The Power of Management Capital explains the new business model of "management capital"--what it is and how the deployment of management assets sets pacesetter companies apart from the also-rans and business failures of the past decade.

Armand Feigenbaum and his brother Donald, an executive vice president at General Systems, Inc., provide a definition of the distinct components of management capital--it is the physical assets, the culture, the approach to innovation, the intellectual capital, the human resources, etc.--and then show how the deployment of each of these assets is key to successful growth and profitability.

Customer Reviews:

NEW PERSPECTIVE ON MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP........2003-11-26

This book explores the powers of leadership and management. It shows these are a seminal force in creating initiatives for business success. The root of success is management capital defined as the overarching theme for capitalizing the management power for optimizing the capacity and effectiveness of total resources. The authors show how recent innovation in business management and leadership has become a driving economic force creating growth and profit. A few of many key topics covered are: the major shift in business investment and management of assets; leadership for achieving fundamental change; recognition of management capital tools and measurements for strong business results. The discussion also includes the "quality of management excellence process." With creative insight, we at Stern's Management Review Online find that this book frames management and leadership in a new, dynamic perspective.

The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment

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The Power of the Machine
A challenging book...
An outstanding book

The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment
Alf Hornborg
Manufacturer: AltaMira Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (BK Currents)

ASIN: 0759100667

Book Description

Hornborg argues that we are caught in a collective illusion about the nature of modern technology that prevents us from imagining solutions to our economic and environmental crises other than technocratic fixes. He demonstrates how the power of the machin

Customer Reviews:

The Power of the Machine.......2006-12-06

This is a compilation of academic papers not intended for the lay reader.
The numerous embedded citations are distracting. It is written in sociological jargon rather than English. With hundreds of heavily referenced ideas, there are a few nuggets of wisdom, but these are painfully hard to unearth.

A challenging book..........2006-07-19

This book is challenging in two main ways.

1) It challenges the dominant worldview about the nature of material and energetic exchange enabled by the global economy, and the role of modern free markets and industrialization in perpetuating and worsening global historical inequalities.

Both the global benefactors (in centers) and the direct victims (in peripheries) of this process are blind to its true nature because our historical frame of discourse about exchange obscures the realities of global resource "exchange"--a word which in itself presumes an equal trade of tit for tat. In this sense, we are all victims of "the machine"--The Matrix style--where people in global peripheries (from where high-quality resources are extracted) as subjected to exploitation at the hands hands of people in global centers (to where the resources go).

Hornborg uses the machine as a means of examining and critiquing industrialization as a process of converting high quality matter/energy into low-quality, but high-priced products. Because these are high-entropy products, they require much more material/energetic inputs in order to operate and sustain them. Thus, they require "feeding," and that is the purpose of peole in global centers. Like that quote from "Fight Club"--"The things you own end up owning you." In a sense, "machines" take on a life of their own as they have power over us and we literally worship them as inherently "productive."

I don't think Hornborg is a luddite--technology isn't inherently evil. It is more a problem of concentration and distribution. However, unless we reach an enlightened position about the true nature of industrialization and global resource transfer, machines will continue to own us, and may push us toward the brink of self-destruction.

2) The book also challenges the reader. Hornborg makes the excuse early on that it is inherently challenging because it aims to construct a whole new worldview to replace the reader's current worldview. This is partially true. However the book is also challenging because how, and for whom, it is written. It is NOT an easy read. It is fairly non-linear, uses many terms that will be obscure to anyone outside of the many fields from which Hornborg draws. He doesn't include a glossary or define many of the technical words he uses, which is a big no no IMO. So keep a dictionary close by. Be patient and be prepared to work hard to extract meaning from what he writes--it is often like piecing together a puzzle where no single part makes much sense until you can gain a sense of the total image. In the end, I think the struggle is worth it--it is actually a very intuitive and even visual argument. I can see an animated diagram in my head that embodies his argument.

But I also think he COULD have written it to be more accessible--there are many sentences that could easily be unpacked. Overall, it might have made the book 100 pages longer, but overall a much smoother read.

I hope his argument gains steam and more people start writing in this vein (albeit more accessibly). The implications are vast, especially among all the trendy and often-meaningless talk about "sustainability."

An outstanding book.......2002-01-10

Before reading this book, I had read several first-rate books dealing with environmental issues; books that tended to approach the subject from a biological (ecological) point of view. Although they were very useful and I learned a lot from them, I thought that they largely overlooked human/social factors, or treated them superficially. I intuitively felt that any analysis of sustainability (or whatever you want to call it) that was not also firmly based in the social sciences and the humanities was incomplete. In short, I decided to keep looking.

I first encountered Alf Hornborg in a recent issue of an academic journal devoted to biosemiotics. The content and clarity of his article there so impressed me that I searched for more information about him on the Internet, discovered that he had written this book, and took the chance of ordering it. The book is all I had hoped for, and then some. I believe this author has seen more deeply into our environmental predicament than anyone I have yet encountered.

Hornborg's main thesis, as stated in the introduction, is that we are "caught in a collective illusion about the nature of modern technology. We do not recognize that what ultimately keeps our machines running are global terms of trade. The power of the machine is not _of_ the machine, but of the asymmetric structures of exchange of which it is an expression."

He goes on to state:

"My argument represents a conjunction of perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. It is polemical in relation to most conventional discourse on 'sustainable development,' ecological economics, and similar topics in suggesting that solutions to our ecological predicament will have to be more profound and radical than is usually envisioned in the environmental debate. I argue for a _defamiliarization_ of our conventional conceptions of technology and development, that is, a fundamental distancing from the cultural categories through which the modern economic system operates, and in terms of which most policy negotiations are conducted. Above all, I argue that we must recognize the global, _distributional_ aspects of development, technology, and environmental issues. The intellectual ancestry of these ideas can be traced to the underexplored interfaces between world system theory, political ecology, ecological economics, economic anthropology, fetishism theory, and semiotics."

The heart of the book, in my opinion, is in chapters 8 through 11. Chapters 9 and 10 are particularly outstanding. Rather than try to summarize the material, which would be hard to do in this brief space, I will close with some brief excerpts from chapter 10, which should impart some of the flavor of what is here:

"Romanticist critiques of Western rationality have a long history, but studies in human ecology seem now to be in a position to articulate a _rational_ critique of that rationality. The contextualist position is not romanticism or mysticism but a sober recognition of the limitations of totalizing institutions and knowledge systems. Because of the sheer complexity and specificity of ecosystemic interrelationships and fluctuations, it is not unreasonable to expect that optimal strategies for sustainable resource management are generally best defined by local practitioners with close and long-term experience of these specificities, and with special stakes in the outcome. Yet it is clear that actual management strategies are today generally informed by entirely different sets of conditions."

...

"Metaphor is a mode of knowing that positions the human subject by _evoking_ non-objectifiable inner states associated with specific forms of practice. The significance of metaphor for the contextualist argument thus lies in its capacity to activate tacit, practical knowledge based on experience of highly specific, local conditions. This position accommodates Ingold's proposition that cultural constructions of the environment are secondary to practical action ('the practitioner's way of knowing'), while recognizing the capacity of such constructions to codify and reinforce a specific, ecological _habitus_, not least in the transmission of such dispositions between generations. A metaphorical 'cognized model' does not so much encode ecological information as provide 'cues' for the activation of specific, practical repertoires appropriated in the context of action."

...

"The discussion on 'traditional ecological knowledge' and 'traditional resource management' is thus intrinsically paradoxical to the extent that it hopes for an appropriation and application of local knowledge by the very modernist framework by which such knowledge is continually being eclipsed. In advocating what he calls 'epistemological decentralization,' Banuri recognizes that an increasing contextuality of knowledge will render 'the expert, trained in universal sciences, an anachronism.' Clearly, an 'expert' in an abstractly conceived field of 'local knowledge' is a contradiction in terms. But this paradox, of course, is a pervasive aspect of the anthropological condition. We can engage in a meta-discourse on knowledge, but in terms of concrete expertise we can at best become awkward apprentices to specific, local practitioners.

Book Description

The first volume in a major series, Technology, Culture and Competitiveness will be an essential read for all those who need to deal with the causes and consequences of rapid technological change in an increasingly globalized world, whether they be government policy-makers, managers of multi-national corporations, commentators on the international scene or specialists in and students of international politics, economics and business studies. The authors discuss three related areas: how we think about technology and international relations/international political economy; in what sense technology is a fundamental component of national competitive advantage and what national, local and corporate policy should be in light of this; and what the relationship is between technological innovation and global and political economics change.

Technology is discussed not just in an instrumental sense-- as a tool of power and an object of policy--but equally in a transcendental sense--as a key to shaping and structuring how we understand and interpret reality. The final section of the book presents case studies of three core sectors of the world--political economy, finance, aviation and automobiles.

Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy

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Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy
Gene (Author) Helpman, Elhanan (With) Grossman
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OQN8V8

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The Power of Management Capital : Utilizing the New Drivers of Innovation, Profitability and Growth in a Demanding Global Economy
Donald Feigenbaum Armand Feigenbaum
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OFNLY8

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