The dynamics of technological knowledge

This chapter aims at providing an original review of the main theoretical approaches to technological knowledge, both implicit and explicit, and of their empirical counterparts in the field of economics of innovation. While there are in the literature interesting contributions aiming at assessing the relative goodness of the different proxies used in empirical analysis of innovation (see for example Kleinknecht et al., 2002), there is a lack of efforts explicitly directed towards synthesis of theoretical and empirical issues in a historical perspective. In this direction, we will go through the most recent debates on the dynamics of knowledge by proposing new methodologies to identifying relevant properties of knowledge that are consistent with the recombinant knowledge concept and allow for its grafting in the complex system dynamics approach in a fairly different way from the extant literature.