Scaffolding in Economics, Management, and the Design of Technologies

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to review the ideas that have been developed to describe the emergence and change of structures in three fields: Economics, Management, and Design of Technologies. The paper focuses on one empirical setting, the economy, and more specifically how firms, industries, and technologies change over time. Today’s industrialized economies are very different from the economies before the industrial revolution. The paper presents key theoretical ideas from evolutionary economics, management, and technology that try to explain why and how economy has been so dramatically transformed over the past 400 years.

Keywords: evolutionary theory, birth and death of organizations, technological evolution, economic history

JEL Classification: L2, M1, N00, O30