1. ‘Whether it be the older literature on research and development or the modern New Growth Theory, the mainstream account runs along the following lines. Knowledge is produced privately using a sausage-machine called research and development that takes in inputs and gives off technological knowledge, which then immediately augments the production function for other goods’ (Langlois, 1999, p.249). This characterization applies to Paul Romer's path-breaking paper (1990) in which knowledge and new designs are generated in the R&D department of firms, and the spillover of such knowledge to all other firms is reflected by including the total stock of knowledge in the economy in the production function of the representive firm (see also Kurz, 2012, pp.95–7). The growing literature on ‘non-R&D’ sources of knowledge production and/or innovation (Barge-Gil, Nieto and Santamaria., 2011; Lee and Walsh, 2016), together with the difficulty of drawing the line, within firms, between R&D, design, engineering, prototyping and scaling up from pilot plants (Freeman and Soete, 2009), should put question marks over such an approach.
2. Economic growth is quantitative, progress qualitative.
3. According to Loasby (1999, p.135), 'The division of labour is the primary means of increasing the division of knowledge, and thereby of promoting the growth of knowledge. Knowledge grows by division: each of us can increase our knowledge only by accepting limits on what we can know.' According to Metcalfe (2014, p.17), 'The division of labour is a division of knowing and, moreover, the division of labour applies to the development of knowledge as well as to its application.'
4. Joan Robinson (1979, p.58) repeatedly pointed out that ‘a confusion between comparisons of imagined equilibrium positions and a process of accumulation going on through history’ was ‘an error in methodology’ on the part of neoclassical economists.
5. The knowledge management literature identifies at least four kinds of knowledge processes at the organizational level – knowledge creation, knowledge application, knowledge integration and knowledge retention (Kraaijenbrink, 2012). The sociology of knowledge literature distinguishes between processes of knowledge production – knowledge organization, dissemination-distribution, and storage-retrieval – and knowledge application (Holzner and Marx, 1979). The history of knowledge identifies at least 32 processes that can be grouped under the four main stages of knowledge gathering, analysing, disseminating and employing (Burke, 2016).