ABSTRACT
The increasing variety of products and services that the author use both in people everyday life and in productive processes is one of the most important aspects of economic development. The role of variety in technological and economic development can be further analysed by following the approach to economic growth and structural change developed by Pasinetti. As the system moves further away from equilibrium new bifurcations take place which increase again the multiplicity of the stationary states of the system. Clearly this increasing multiplicity of stationary states of the system is equivalent to an increase in variety. An open economic system subject to increasingly strong external constraints is therefore likely to develop an increasing variety. The concept of entropy has been introduced for its relationship to that of information. Routines could therefore be redefined as the union of a set of environmental stimuli with a set of internal organisational responses.
