Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This introductory chapter offers an overview of the whole analysis of the book. The economy is interpreted as a complex evolving system. We start from a broad historical overview of ‘what there is to be explained’. There are three basic questions at the core of the whole economic discipline since its inception: first, the drivers and patterns of change of the capitalistic machine of production and innovation and, second, the mechanisms of coordination among a multitude of self-seeking economic agents often characterized by conflicting interests. Behind them there is an even more ambitious question, that is, third, why some countries succeeded in industrializing and others remained dramatically poor. Next, we outline the major building blocks of the interpretation, concerning the patterns of innovation, the nature and behaviour of economic agents—individuals and firms, their mechanisms of interaction, and the structure and dynamics of the industries in which they are nested. The processes of innovation, together with the far-from-equilibrium interactions yield as emergent properties the higher-level regularities which one historically observes in terms of technologies, industries, and whole economies.