The Management of Innovation and Technology or Bringing the Empire Back Home

The Management of Innovation and Technology: The Shaping of Technology and Institutions of the Market Economy

Author: John Howells

This book analyzes a range of social contexts in which human decisions shape technology in the market economy. It comprises a critical review of both a select research literature and in-depth historical studies. Material is drawn from many social science disciplines to inform the reader of the reality of taking decisions on innovation.

The chapters cover:

• The social context for individual acts of creative insight
• The development of the technology-market relationship
• The management of R&D and technological standards
• Technological competition
• The role of institutions of finance in innovation
• The reciprocal relationship between intellectual property law and technological innovation
• The role of technological skills and regimes of technological education in innovation
• An introduction to the role of the state in maintaining the innovative capacity of the private sector

 

Table of Contents:

1	Technological innovation	1
2	Invention, science, R&D and concepts of use and market	22
3	Patterns in technological development and the creation of technological standards	61
4	Competition and innovation as substitution threat	85
5	Intellectual property law and innovation	114
6	Finance - techniques, institutions and innovation	145
7	Innovation and the organisation of technical expertise and work	182
8	The state and the management of technology	227
9	Concluding comments on this book	268

See also:

Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age

Author: Herman Lebovics

Thirty years ago, an international anti-globalization movement was born in the grazing lands of France's Larzac plateau. In the 1970s, Larzac farmers were joined by others from around the world in their efforts to prevent the expansion of a local military base: by ecologists, religious pacifists, and urban leftists, and by social activists including American Indians and South American peasant leaders. In 1999 some of the same farmers who had fought the expansion of the base in the 1970s -- including Jose Bove -- dismantled the new local McDonald's. That gesture was part of a protest against U.S. tariffs on specified French exports including Roquefort cheese, the region's primary market product. The two struggles -- the one against expanding a French army camp intended to train troops for postcolonial wars, the other against American economic might -- were landmarks in the global campaign to preserve local cultures. They were also key episodes in the decades-long attempt by the French to define their cultural heritage within a much changed nation, a new Europe, and, especially, an American-dominated world.

In Bringing the Empire Back Home, the inventive cultural historian Herman Lebovics provides a riveting account of how intense disputes about what it means to be French have played out over the past half-century, redefining Paris, the regions, and the former colonies in relation to one another and the world at large. In a narrative populated with peasants, people from the former colonies, museum curators, former colonial administrators, left Christians, archaeologists, anthropologists, soccer players and their teenage fans, and, yes, leading government officials, Lebovics reveals contemporary French society and cultures as perhaps the West's most important testing grounds of pluralism and assimilation. A lively cultural history, Bringing the Empire Back Home highlights not only the political significance of France's efforts to synthesize the regional, national, European, ethnic postcolonial, and global but also the chaotic beauty of the endeavor.