Systemic Innovation

4Evolution of Firms Trajectories and Innovation: Knowledge Capital and Financial Opportunities

4.1. Introduction

The notion of trajectory became popular in the economics and management of innovation in the context of the development of the evolutionary theory of economic change (Nelson and Winter 1982), which focused on the questions of change and the behavior of organizations considered as economic systems. The question of the intensity and direction of technological change is at the heart of the analyses. In a debate still largely dominated by the exogenous or non-exogenous nature of technological progress, G. Dosi (1982) analyzes technological paradigms and trajectories in analogy with T.S. Kuhn’s 1962 study on scientific paradigms. According to Kuhn, paradigms correspond to universally recognized scientific discoveries which, for a time, provide a community of researchers with typical problems and solutions (Kuhn 1962/70). Within these paradigms, “normal” scientific work develops, a “normal science” that “means research firmly based on one or more past achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (Kuhn 1962/70, p. 10). For Dosi, technological trajectories thus appear as “normal” technical progress within a technological paradigm. To define trajectories and explain their variety evolutionary economists also put forward the concept of technological regimes (Winter 1984) that ...