ABSTRACT

It may be concluded on the basis of recent studies of emerging technologies in the USA, Japan, and Germany that the characteristics of technology at the beginning of the twenty-first century show a series of changes: drastically increasing costs of innovation, the growing significance of interdisciplinarity and the dynamism of overlapping technology areas, an increasingly close relationship between basic research and industrial application, and a tighter meshing of research and demand. This chapter emphasizes two of these changes: the increasing role of science-based technology, following Pavitt's (1984) terminology of science-based technologies, and the growing importance of multi- and interdisciplinarity which is a reflection of the fact that a separation of technologies becomes more and more difficult and the overlapping areas are often highly dynamic. These phenomena have several consequences for systems of innovation. While they are not totally ‘new', insofar as they are indications of a long-term process of structural change in knowledge production and diffusion, they may be new paradigms.