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The first digital electronic computer, the ENIAC, was over 100
feet long, with 18,000 simultaneously functioning vacuum tubes. Now the compact
PC is a ubiquitous feature of home and business. In 1903 the Wright brothers'
airplane, held together with baling wire and glue, traveled a couple hundred yards.
Today fleets of streamlined jets transport millions of people per day to cities
worldwide. Between discovery and application, there is a world of innovation,
of tinkering and improvements and adaptations. This is the world David Mowery
and Nathan Rosenberg map out in their tour of the intersecting routes of technological
change and economic growth in 20th-century America. The
authors focus on three areas of innovation that have dominated American technology
in this century: the internal combustion engine, electricity/electronics, and
chemistry. These three clusters of innovation are also highly research-intensive,
allowing Mowery and Rosenberg to explore the importance of both "science"
and technological innovation and improvement in realizing the economic consequences
of technological advances. The cases of chemicals and the internal combustion
engine also offer a lesson in the influence of geography and available resources
on technological development. Throughout their book,
Mowery and Rosenberg demonstrate that the simultaneous emergence of new engineering
and applied science disciplines in the universities in tandem with growth in the
R&D industry and scientific research has been a primary factor in the rapid
rate of technological change. Innovation and incentives to develop new, viable
processes have led to the creation of new economic resources -- which will, in
turn, determine the future of American technological innovation and economic growth.
David C. Mowery is Professor at the Haas School of Business,
University of California, Berkeley. He is coauthor with Nathan Rosenberg of Technology
and the Pursuit of Economic Growth (Cambridge University Press, 1989), editor
of The International Software Computer Industry (1996), and coeditor of
the forthcoming Sources of Industrial Leadership (with Richard R. Nelson,
Cambridge University Press). Nathan Rosenberg
is Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He is the author of Perspectives
on Technology (1976), Inside
the Black Box (1994, all Cambridge University Press),
coauthor of How the West Grew Rich
(with L. E. Birdzell, Jr.) and the title cited above with Professor Mowery, among
other works. |
