Average customer rating:
|
Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0521542170 |
Book Description
Technological artefacts and biological organisms ‘evolve’ by very similar processes of blind variation and selective retention. This analogy is explored systematically, for the first time, by a team of international experts from evolutionary biology, history and sociology of science and technology, cognitive and computer science, economics, psychology, education, cultural anthropology and research management. Do technological ‘memes’ play the role of genes? In what sense are novel inventions ‘blind’? Does the element of design make them ‘Lamarckian’ rather than ‘Darwinian’? Is the recombination of ideas the essence of technological creativity? Can invention be simulated computationally? What are the entities that actually evolve - artefacts, ideas or organisations? These are only some of the many questions stimulated and partially answered by this powerful metaphor. With its practical demonstration of the explanatory potential of ‘evolutionary reasoning’ in a well-defined context, this book is a ground-breaking contribution to every discipline concerned with cultural change.Customer Reviews:
Beyond the ordinary, context-dependent realization.......2004-02-28
My perspective is teh development of things from memes to chips to organisms and everything in-between, thus epigenesis, computer science, are a continuum with in my context.
Average customer rating: |
Applied Evolutionary Economics And the Knowledge-based Economy
Manufacturer: Edward Elgar Publishing ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 1843769034 |
Book Description
This book focuses on knowledge-based economies and attempts to analyze dynamic innovation driven processes within those economies.It shows that evolutionary economics, and in particular the strand of applied industry and innovation studies often called Neo-Schumpeterian economics, has left the nursery of new academic approaches and is able to offer important insights for the understanding of socio-economic processes of change and development having a strong impact on economic reality all over the world. The contributions are summarized under four major sections - knowledge and cognition, studies of knowledge-based industries, the geographical dimension of knowledge-based economies and measuring and modelling for knowledge-based economies - and give a broad overview of the prolific research being undertaken in applied evolutionary economics.
Average customer rating: |
Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History (Hagley Center Studies in the History of Business and Technology)
Manufacturer: Routledge ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0415945488 |
Book Description
Scientists have developed a featherless chicken designed to make industrial chicken production more efficient, while specially trained Pacific bottlenose dolphins are being deployed in the Persian Gulf to disarm mines and protect our Navy. Everyone knows Darwin's theory of natural selection, but what about his idea of artificial selection--how humans, not nature, rework natural organisms to meet our needs? Industrializing Organisms brings us to the threshold of the new field of evolutionary history--from the mobilization of war horses in the 19th century to today's engineered plants and manipulated animals.
Average customer rating: |
Technological Transitions And System Innovations: A Co-evolutionary And Socio-technical Analysis
Frank W. Geels Manufacturer: Edward Elgar Publishing ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 1845420098 |
Book Description
This important book addresses how long term and large scale shifts from one socio-technical system to another come about, using insights from evolutionary economics, sociology of technology and innovation studies. These major changes involve not just technological changes, but also changes in markets, regulation, culture, industrial networks and infrastructure.The book develops a multi-level perspective, arguing that transitions take place through the alignment of multiple processes at three levels: niche, regime and landscape. This perspective is illustrated by detailed historical case studies: the transition from sailing ships to steamships, the transition from horse-and-carriage to automobiles and the transition from propeller-piston engine aircraft to turbojets.
This book will be of great interest to researchers in innovation studies, evolutionary economics, sociology of technology and environmental studies. It will also be useful for policy makers involved in long-term sustainability and systems transitions issues.
Average customer rating: |
Understanding the Dynamics of a Knowledge Economy (Studies in Evolutionary Political Economy Series)
Manufacturer: Edward Elgar Publishing ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 1845423070 |
Book Description
The 'knowledge economy' is a concept commonly deemed too ambiguous and elusive to hold any significance in current economic debate. This valuable new book seeks to refute that myth. Presenting an important collection of views, from a number of leading scholars, this innovative volume visibly demonstrates that knowledge and information are a prime resource in driving the dynamics of an economy.It is argued that in order to understand the knowledge economy a diverse set of insights and approaches are required, which shed new and striking light on the roots of present-day economic dynamics. Using both theoretical and empirical material, this interdisciplinary collection offers a range of micro and macro perspectives. It draws on a variety of scientific backgrounds, and uses and develops a number of different methodologies, some of which may not be familiar in mainstream economics. The approaches adopted by historians, economists, systems theorists, management scholars and geographers which are explored in this book are central to encouraging a new and practical way forward in reading the dynamics of the knowledge economy.
In offering these key insights, this important volume makes an invaluable contribution to the lively debate surrounding the knowledge economy. An essential read for economists, this book will also find widespread appeal amongst scholars of management, cultural studies and geography.
Average customer rating:
|
The Design of Innovation (Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computation)
David E. Goldberg Manufacturer: Springer ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
Accessories:
ASIN: 1402070985 |
Book Description
The Design of Innovation illustrates how to design and implement competent genetic algorithms-genetic algorithms that solve hard problems quickly, reliably, and accurately-and how the invention of competent genetic algorithms amounts to the creation of an effective computational theory of human innovation. For the specialist in genetic algorithms and evolutionary computation, this book combines over two decades of hard-won research results in a single volume to provide a comprehensive step-by-step guide to designing genetic algorithms that scale well with problem size and difficulty. For the innovation researcher - whether from the social and behavioral sciences, the natural sciences, the humanities, or the arts - this unique book gives a consistent and valuable mathematical and computational viewpoint for understanding certain aspects of human innovation. For all readers, The Design of Innovation provides an entrée into the world of competent genetic algorithms and innovation through a methodology of invention borrowed from the Wright brothers. Combining careful decomposition, cost-effective, little analytical models, and careful design, the road to competence is paved with easily understood examples, simulations, and results from the literature.Customer Reviews:
Great for GA-centered research, doubtful otherwise.......2002-12-14
This book is actually a research monograph reporting on the results of this research. The title "The Design of Innovation" sets up a high level of expectation but the subtitle "lessons learned from and for competent GAs" is probably right. The book offers some useful insights into the internal workings of GAs and their implication for understanding true innovation. However, despite the introductory claim of an engineering approach, the book never gets around to actually showing practitioners how to apply the lessons, nor does it give direct evidence that they work as claimed (although references to recent papers which presumably demonstrate success are given).
It is perhaps ironic that the goal for GAs has been downgraded from "universal" (as first claimed by Holland) to "competent".
Goldberg's concentrates on GAs to the exclusion of other approaches that may be equally competent or even better. A further irony is the stunning admission that "for years GA practitioners have understood that commercial applications often require" combinations of GAs and other local search methods to obtain high-quality solutions in reasonable time. But if this is so, then maybe GAs aren't the best place to start in the first place.
Goldberg's ideas about the upcoming golden age of computational innovation in the last chapter are provocative. But the implication that we must await GA improvements for this to happen are a little off-putting.
In sum, this book is a well-written research monograph intended to open up further research into the heart and soul of GAs. It should be read by researchers in AI, machine learning, and related fields. However, it will not provide the immediate answers to practitioners who are now running into the limitations of GAs (and other evolutionary or general search techniques).
Average customer rating: |
Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis
Manufacturer: The MIT Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0262132699 |
Book Description
A departure from mainstream biology, the idea of symbiosis - as in the genetic and metabolic interactions of the bacterial communities that became the earliest eukaryotes and eventually evolved into plants and animals - has attracted the attention of a growing number of scientists.
Average customer rating: |
Innovation, Technology and Hypercompetition (Routledge Studies in Global Competition)
H Gottinger Manufacturer: Routledge ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0415400023 |
Book Description
In an increasing technologically-led century the striking pattern that emerges in firms' innovative activities is that companies compete for a technological leadership position in situations best described as races. In high technology industries, where customers are willing to pay a premium for advanced technology, leadership translates into increasing returns in the market through positive network externalities.
Innovation, Technology and Hypercompetition synthesizes and unifies both the various methodological approaches for the industry-specific analysis of fast changing competitive positions driven by relentless innovation (hypercompetition).
Game-theoretic and agent-based tools are applied to competitive industries in various market settings and in a global context. Rivalry of this sort is seen to extend to the catching up and forging ahead of regions and nations.
The book provides the behavioral foundations for what is driving globalization. It should be of interest to a broad range of people , academic economists , legal experts, management consultants and practitioners alike.
Average customer rating: |
The Economics of Persistent Innovation: An Evolutionary View (Economics of Science, Technology and Innovation)
Manufacturer: Springer ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0387288724 |
Book Description
The Economics of Persistent Innovation presents papers that provide definitions of persistence in firm innovative behavior, establish the significance of persistence, present a theory of persistence, and examine empirical evidence regarding both the extent of, and the determinants of, persistence. They survey previous studies which have commented on persistence and present new data describing trends in the persistence in innovation. The book discusses the main determinants of persistence and the reasons for its systematic heterogeneity across industries, technologies and countries. The book first focuses on the determinants of persistence in innovation. This topic is analyzed in several ways, including a Markovian model of innovation. The characteristics of persistent inventors as revealed in patent data are explored for many industrial countries. An evolutionary theory of persistence in innovation is proposed. In conclusion we draw some policy implications for support and development of innovation.
Average customer rating: |
Evolutionary Innovations: The Business of Biotechnology
Maureen D. McKelvey Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0198297246 |
Book Description
This book examines the initial commercial uses of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is one of the most modern, controversial and dynamic of the science-based technologies. It is not an object, but a set of techniques or way of doing things. The development of these technologies from the 1970s onwards illustrates the changing relationships between universities and firms, and between basic science and research oriented towards commercial uses. The main focus of the book is on two firmsDSGenentech in the United States and Kabi in Sweden and their activities and 'knowledge-seeking' behaviour in the development of human growth hormone and how those ran in parallel with university science. IEvolutionary Innovationswas awarded the Schumpeter Society book proze in 1996. This paperback edition includes a new introduction in which the author reflects upon the most recent developments in biotechnology. The book will be of interest to a wide audience concerned to understand the complexities of innovation processes in the 'knowledge society', for example, management and organization researchers, economists, policy advisors, and managers and strategists responsible for turning knowledge into product and profit.Books:
Recommended Books