*This is an in-person event held at the Council Room, 2nd Floor of Strand Campus at King’s College London, from 4-6pm. There is no RSVP or registration needed, interested parties may simply show up.
This is a research workshop organised by the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society, with the following synopsis:
All innovations are expressions of human imagination and are essentially combinations of different kinds of knowledge. We apply Mengerian analysis of the wants-goods nexus and the recombinant-capital approach to explore the nature of innovation processes in market economies. Innovation always manifests itself in a dynamic expansion of wants, a broadening in the range (variety) of goods, ever-increasing complexity of the network of goods complementarities, and qualitative changes in the capital structure. Innovation is not a change of things per se but a change in epistemic content—a change in our understanding of the causal connections between human wants and the want-satisfying properties of things that render them capable of serving human purposes. Entrepreneurs and co-creative users discover unmet consumer wants and corresponding gaps in the range of goods offered, put together new combinations and create new markets. These new markets in turn aid the growth of knowledge by serving as social institutions for generating, testing and replacing entrepreneurial conjectures.
We derive some preliminary implications of our approach for the political economy of innovation policy. In particular, we examine constructivist approaches to innovation policy that presume that we can deliberately change and direct complex innovation systems through macro-level institutional engineering to correct “system failures”. Constructivist approaches pay scant attention to the grassroots knowledge processes and subjective consumer valuations involved in bottom-up innovation. We use a case study of LEGO as an archetype of a socially distributed system of knowledge-generation and innovation.
About the Speaker:
Professor David Harper is Clinical Professor of Economics in the Dept. of Economics at New York University and is also Co-Director of the Program on the Foundations of the Market Economy. His research interests are on Institutional Economics, Austrian Economics, entrepreneurship, innovation, complexity and economic development. He has written two books (Entrepreneurship and the Market Process: An Enquiry into the Growth of Knowledge, and Foundations of Entrepreneurship and Economic Development) and has published extensively in academic journals relating to his area of interest.
