Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in 20th-Century America

by David C. Mowery, Nathan Rosenberg

The first digital electronic computer, the ENIAC, was over 100 feet long, with 18,000 simultaneously functioning vacuum tubes. Now virtually every business and home in America has its own compact PC. In 1903 the Wright brothers' airplane, held together with baling wire and glue, traveled a couple hundred yards. Today fleets of streamlined jets transport millions of people per day to cities worldwide. Between discovery and application, between invention and widespread use, there is a world of innovation, of tinkering and improvements and adaptations. This is the world David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg map out in Paths of Innovation, a tour of the intersecting routes of the technological.

Genres: Technology

214 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Adam]

"Technological bottlenecks," often centered around individual components or the interconnections of components, within the system. [...] transistors.

Created three new industries -- electric computers, computer software and semiconductor components -- in the postwar US economy.

Rapid diffusion of low-cost operating software, combined with a rapid emergence of a few dominant designs fit this architecture, eroded vertical integrative between hardware send software products and opened up opportunities for independent software vendors (ISVs).

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mowrey and Rosenberg investigate 20th century innovation in America through the lenses of internal combustion engines, chemistry, and electricity/electronics. I feel like these fields are rather ad hoc, compared to the 'carrier branch technologies' of a Kondratiev Wave. They make some interesting observations about the shift from an internal corporate-level R&D to the modern state supported defense R&D system, and the role of anti-trust law, but don't really go into in rigorously.

As for why America won the innovation race in the 20th century, it's because we won WW2. We didn't have our industrial base bomb, we looted German scientists post-war, we had access to overseas resources and could afford to pay for them. The interplay of military dominance, scientific expertise, and a rising middle class is very important, but only really alluded to.

Not that is is a bad book, it's just not as good as the other books on my innovation shelf.

[za · Rating 3 out of 5]

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