ABSTRACT
This book has synthesized modern perspectives in innovation and development economics which emphasize the role of networks, diversity and entrepreneurship for human agency. It stresses that economic systems and social relations are not static but change over time, leading to different sets of capabilities that people need to be free and active members of the society. Within dynamic socioeconomic systems, access to various social networks can increase people’s choices, but fixed roles and dependent network positions can also be a root cause of inequality and poverty. Economic diversification can increase the number of potential social choices, but can also lead to increasingly difficult decision processes and economic inequality between different regions. Due to the structural and dynamic features of development, emphasis of development policies on individual capabilities (e.g. education and health) is a necessary but not the only factor needed to empower people and promote social inclusion. Congruent innovation and human development policies are also necessary, to encourage entrepreneurship and diversification not just simply for the sake of production expansion, but also to create valuable new choices and to promote human agency. This book contributes to emergent approaches (such as social entrepreneurship, systems of innovation and development, and evolutionary welfare economics) which aim to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamic relations between innovation and human development. These approaches (e.g. Arocena and Sutz 2005; Binder 2010; Ziegler 2010; Capriati 2013) combine the following two complementary perspectives on development:
Amartya Sen’s perception of development as expanding human freedom, emphasizing the need to provide every human being with the basic capabilities and opportunities to determine their own life and to be active agents of development; and
the Schumpeterian concept of development as a historical process of endogenous structural changes and pattern formations, driven by the introduction of innovations and co-evolutionary processes.
