Innovation as Collective Action: Conventions, Products and Technologies

This article argues that specific products evidence demand for specific innovation systems. Economies must therefore supply different innovation systems according to their trade specializations and output compositions. Products (or product-based subsectors, the equivalent of five-digit SIC sectors) are the basic units around which innovative action can be ‘supplied’. Understanding and promoting innovation requires understanding of both the demand and supply sides. A system of innovation refers to the interaction of demands, attached to products, and supplies, attached to these organizational structures of the economy, as dual sequential processes ‘out of equilibrium’ and involving reciprocal selection. The approach used in this paper reflects the ‘economics of conventions’, an emerging school of economic thought which holds that economies can be conceived as sets of rules, largely implicit in nature, which actors generate and by which they coordinate themselves under conditions of uncertainty. The task of analysis is to understand the cognitive and efficiency properties of functioning sytems of conventions, as well as their emergence and transformation over time.