ABSTRACT
Horizontal technology policies (HTP) have been widely used to promote innovation and technical change. Until recently, however, there has been almost no attempt to conceptualize such policies and contrast them with other types of industrial and technological policy. One explanation for this omission follows from the need to explicitly use the tenets of evolutionary theory when dealing with an HTP framework. Under a neoclassical perspective, the contours of the real world are supposed to be relatively well known, including the nature and location of market failure, and little can be said for a distinct family of horizontal technology and industrial support programs.
