The solar photovoltaic sector is moving forward very fast, both in terms of its own technological advancement and its standing among global renewable energy technologies. Rapid increases in solar cell efficiencies, fast technical change in solar batteries and solar glass, and economies of scale in production fuel its rapid adoption, and it is becoming clear that existing forecasts about its adoption need to be updated extensively. This timely and distinctive examination of the economic side of the field takes into account solar PV’s recent and growing lead among renewable energies competing to replace fossil fuels.
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The Revolution in Energy Technology
Innovation and the Economics of the Solar Photovoltaic Industry
Xue Han and Jorge Niosi
Edited by Faïz Gallouj and Faridah Djellal
This book aims to take account of the major advances made in ‘Service Innovation Studies’ (SIS) and above all to provide an agenda setting out the research priorities in the field. This agenda is established by considering the issue of innovation in services in relation to a number of major contemporary challenges, including environmental issues, social inclusion, economic development, service ecosystems, smart service systems, religion, ageing, public organizations, gender, and ethical and societal issues. Bringing together internationals experts in the field of SIS, the book illustrates the strength and fertility of this research trajectory. It will be of great interest for both services and innovation scholars in economics, management science and public administration.
Edited by Tüzin Baycan and Hugo Pinto
Resilience has emerged as a recurrent notion to explain how territorial socio-economic systems adapt successfully (or not) to negative events. In this book, the authors use resilience as a bridging notion to connect different types of theoretical and empirical approaches to help understand the impacts of economic turbulence at the system and actor levels. The book provides a unique overview of the financial crisis and the important dimension of innovation dynamics for regional resilience. It also offers an engaging debate as to how regional resilience can be improved and explores the social aspects of vulnerability, resilience and innovation.
Edited by Urban Gråsjö, Charlie Karlsson and Iréne Bernhard
Developed countries must be incredibly innovative to secure incomes and welfare so that they may successfully compete against international rivals. This book focuses on two specific but interrelated aspects of innovation by incumbent firms and entrepreneurs, the role of geography and of open innovation.
Cities and Sustainable Technology Transitions
Leadership, Innovation and Adoption
Edited by Marina van Geenhuizen, J. Adam Holbrook and Mozhdeh Taheri
This enlightening book elucidates the leadership challenges of various cities in emerging transitions towards higher levels of sustainability. It examines elements of three socio-technical systems, energy, transport and healthcare, while addressing technology invention, commercialization, mass-production and adoption. The book breaks new ground in the analysis of topical issues such as local ‘cradle’ conditions, incentive schemes, niche-development, living labs, impact bonds, grass-roots intermediation and adaptive policy making. It offers a broad coverage of global systems of cities, with a particular focus on Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, China, Korea, Japan, the US and Canada.
Governing Science and Technology under the International Economic Order
Regulatory Divergence and Convergence in the Age of Megaregionals
Edited by Shin-yi Peng, Han-Wei Liu and Ching-Fu Lin
Against the backdrop of the recent trend towards megaregional trade initiatives, this book addresses the most topical issues that lie at the intersection of law and technology. By assessing international law and the political economy, the contributing authors offer an enhanced understanding of the challenges of diverging regulatory approaches to innovation.
The Evolutionary Complexity of Endogenous Innovation
The Engines of the Creative Response
Cristiano Antonelli
The notion of endogenous innovation as the outcome of the creative response of firms to out-of-equilibrium conditions is the cornerstone of the new evolutionary complexity. This book elaborates and applies the theoretical framework established in the author’s previous work Endogenous Innovation: The Economics of an Emergent System Property. This volume carefully explores the role of the reactivity of firms to out-of-equilibrium conditions. It also examines the quality of knowledge governance mechanisms in assessing the levels of externalities that define the likelihood of creative responses, as an alternative to adaptive responses.
Cristiano Antonelli
This Research Review presents a compilation of key papers chronicling the evolution of the economics of information into the economics of knowledge. It traces the unfolding of the fertile ambiguity and ambivalence of the notion of information with the identification and eventual separation of its two basic, quite distinct meanings: knowledge and signals. It documents the progressive understanding that it is not only necessary to search, screen and understand signals, but also to assess and select them so as to distinguish between true, false and fake ones. The capability to process signals and transform them into actual information stems from the stock of competence and knowledge that individuals and organizations possess and mobilize. Together with an original introduction by the editor, this collection will be an indispensable research tool for economists and scholars alike.
Innovation, Economic Development and Policy
Selected Essays
Jan Fagerberg
This authoritative and enlightening book focuses on fundamental questions such as what is innovation, who is it relevant for, what are the effects, and what is the role of (innovation) policy in supporting innovation-diffusion? The first two sections present a comprehensive overview of our current knowledge on the phenomenon and analyse how this knowledge (and the scholarly community underpinning it) has evolved towards its present state. The third part explores the role of innovation for growth and development, while section four is concerned with the national innovation system and the role of (innovation) policy in influencing its dynamics and responding to the important challenges facing contemporary societies.
Firms, Finance and Sustainable Transitions
The Financial Constraints of Eco-Innovation Companies
Edgardo Sica
This thought-provoking book introduces a financial economics perspective to the topic of eco-innovations and, more generally, sociotechnical transitions. It develops a model that illustrates how financial constraints can prevent the development of eco-innovations within companies and hinder the transition process towards a more sustainable regime. Edgardo Sica presents a review of the state of the art, as well as new data from original surveys aimed at testing the impact of financial constraints on eco-innovative decisions at radical and niche levels.