Cecilia Rikap

Bengt-Åke Lundvall

This book develops new theoretical perspectives on the economics and politics of innovation and knowledge in order to capture new trends in modern capitalism. It shows how giant corporations establish themselves as intellectual monopolies and how each of them builds and controls its own corporate innovation system. It presents an analysis of a new form of production where Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, and their counterparts in China, extract value and appropriate intellectual rents through privileged access to AI algorithms trained by data from organizations and individuals all around the world. These companies’ specific form of production and rent-seeking takes place at the global level and challenges national governments trying to regulate intellectual monopolies and attempting to build stronger national innovation systems. It is within this context that the authors provide new insights on the complex interplay between corporate and national innovation systems by looking at the US-China conflict, understood as a struggle for global technological supremacy. The book ends with alternative scenarios of global governance and advances policy recommendations as well as calls for social activism. This book will be of interest to students, academics and practitioners (both from national states and international organizations) and professionals working on innovation, digital capitalism and related topics.

Conceptualizing the Emerging New World Order

The Digital Innovation Race

Written by the scholar who, together with Chris Freeman, first introduced the concept of the innovation system, this book brings the literature an important step forward. Based upon extraordinarily rich empirical material, it shows how and why competence building and innovation are crucial for economic growth and competitiveness in the current era. It also provides a case study of a small, very successful European economy combining wealth creation with social cohesion.

The Danish Model

Innovation, Growth, and Social Cohesion

Edward Lorenz

When seeking to bench mark the performance of European economies, commentators often look to compare them to the economies of Japan and the United States. How Europe's Economies Learn shows how this is seriously misleading, and how any such comparison needs to be complemented with an understanding of the fundamental differences between Europe's economies. The contributors provide an up-to-date description and analysis of the way differences in state systems and institutional contexts, such as labour markets, education and training systems, and financial systems, shape learning processes and innovation performance across the member nations of the European Union. In doing so, it draws important conclusion for how policy strategies should be designed at the national and European levels in order to further promote the goals of the Lisbon process.

Coordinating Competing Models

How Europe's Economies Learn

‘The Learning Economy and the Economics of Hope’ brings together the most important contributions by an expert on policies, management and economics of innovation and knowledge. It offers original insights in processes of innovation and learning and it draws implications for economic theory and public policy. It introduces the reader to important concepts such as innovation systems and the learning economy. It throws a new light on economic development and opens up for a new kind of economics – the economics of hope. It offers a fresh perspective on many of the most important global challenges of today showing how full attention to the characteristics of the learning economy needs to be combined with innovation in global governance. The analysis demonstrates that new technology is developed in an interaction between individuals and organizations and that innovation would not thrive in an economy similar to textbook models of pure markets and perfect competition. It also shows that innovation requires that scientific knowledge is combined with experience based learning and that the performance of innovation systems therefore reflects the combination of research efforts and organizational learning. Growing inequality in income and in access to knowledge and learning is presented as a threat to social cohesion and global well-being. In the concluding part of the book the conceptual framework is used to study how China’s innovation system and policy, Europe’s crisis and underdevelopment in Africa interact is shaping an imbalanced and crisis ridden world system. A new kind of economics, policy learning and new regimes of global governance are presented as elements of hope for the future.

Bengt-Åke Lundvall

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