ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the 'Manchester' workshop at its meeting in 1988. It discusses specifically that the advantages lie in how one defines technology, emancipation from equilibrium states, handling of information and uncertainty, capacity to deal with complex overlapping organizational structures and understanding the role of science and related institutions in bringing about technological change. The chapter summarizes some reasons why the organic metaphor has tended to be overshadowed by the mechanical metaphor in social and economic theory. It attempts to define information and explore its properties in an evolutionary sense. The chapter provides some empirical content to those ideas by describing briefly a number of examples of how pre-competitive research is organized in biotechnology. It represents a further exploration in the use of the organic metaphor to explain the evolutionary behaviour of economic systems. The chapter concludes the evolutionary economic activity as an organic phenomenon which has close commonalities with the corresponding evolution of natural and physical systems.
