Growing by Leaps and Inches: Creative Destruction, Real Cost Reduction, and Inching Up
50 Pages Posted: 17 May 2002 Last revised: 14 Dec 2022
Date Written: May 2002
Abstract
Most firms achieve perfective progress, incrementally improving commodities or productivity. But technological progress is concentrated in a few firms achieving metamorphic progress: forming or transforming industries with technological breakthroughs (e.g., biotechnology, lasers, semiconductors, nanotechnology). Unless congruent with incumbents' science and technology base, metamorphic progress promotes entry. Scientific breakthroughs embodied in discovering scientists, protected by natural excludability, and transferred by learning-by-doing-with at the bench generally drive metamorphic progress. Embodied knowledge is rivalrous and leads to entry and industry dominance by star-scientist-linked firms. Incorporating this scientific-entrepreneurial process is essential to improving - if not transforming - endogenous growth models.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
By Lynne G. Zucker, Michael R. Darby, ...
-
By Lynne G. Zucker and Michael R. Darby
-
Labor Mobility from Academe to Commerce
By Lynne G. Zucker, Michael R. Darby, ...
-
Movement of Star Scientists and Engineers and High-Tech Firm Entry
By Lynne G. Zucker and Michael R. Darby
-
Going Public When You Can in Biotechnology
By Michael R. Darby and Lynne G. Zucker
-
By Lynne G. Zucker and Michael R. Darby
-
Minerva Unbound: Knowledge Stocks, Knowledge Flows and New Knowledge Production
By Lynne G. Zucker, Michael R. Darby, ...
-
Grilichesian Breakthroughs: Inventions of Methods of Inventing and Firm Entry in Nanotechnology
By Michael R. Darby and Lynne G. Zucker
-
Star Scientists, Innovation and Regional and National Immigration
By Lynne G. Zucker and Michael R. Darby
-
Star Scientists, Innovation and Regional and National Immigration
By Lynne G. Zucker and Michael R. Darby