Welcome to the Innovation Studies Group.it!
The Innovation Studies is a a research group working in the area of The Economics of Science, Innovation and Technological Change at Politecnico di Torino, under the supervision of Professor Mario Calderini.
Why Studying Innovation?
Competition is today increasingly made of Innovation, both at the level of single firms or industries, and at the level of national wealth.
In today’s economy, the generation of new products and services is the most important way of gaining market shares and running profitable business. This general trend is changing the way business is performed in a truly fundamental way, and creates, at the same time, new business opportunities and market discontents.
Of course the importance of innovation is not confined to business management, but, at the aggregate level, technological change constitutes the very basis of economic growth and societal improvement. As Robert Solow was first to assess, in his famous 1959 article, that eventually earned him the Noble Price for Economics, the biggest share of economic growth (87% in his estimate) cannot be explained by the growth of economic factors, and it can only be attributed to technological change.
What is Economics of Science, Innovation and Technological Change?
Economics of Science, Innovation and Technological Change is a branch of Economics that studies technological change in its various forms. It includes, studying the environments where Science and Technology are generated and diffused, with a special focus on their structure of incentives and their organization and governance structure.
Management of Innovation deals with how to best organize resources in order to generate, spread, use and extract value from innovation, while Finance of Innovation analyses the determinants and potential solutions to market failures in the provision of financial resourses, for investing in innovation and technological change.
Innovation Studies are increasingly referred as a relatively independent stream of research, gathering the contribution of several disciplines of the Social Sciences, and aimed at developing knowledge on the various facets of technological change.
Read more on the emergence of Innovation Studies:
Read a more complete Introduction to the Economics of Science, Innovation and Technological Change: