ABSTRACT
The word “innovation” conjures up many different meanings in fields of inquiry as diverse as economics, management, organizational behaviour, sociology, engineering, biology, psychology, history and political science. The origins of current mainstream management thinking about innovation in organizations are to be found in economic theory and in this chapter I explore those origins and how they have influenced current thinking. The chapter first considers how innovation is dealt with in classical and neoclassical economics, and how this led to one of the main strands of current thinking about innovation, namely, the view of innovation as a rational, planned process. The chapter then goes on to look at some key features of what has come to be called evolutionary economics and how this is expressed in views of innovation as an entrepreneurial and social process, the other main strand of current thinking. This provides the context within which the different view I propose in this book might be understood.
