The Nature of Technology

We now have a more direct description of technology than saying it is a means to a purpose. A technology is a phenomenon captured and put to use. Or more accurately I should say it is a collection of phenomena captured and put to use. I use the word “captured” here, but many other words would do as well. I could say the phenomenon is harnessed, sei

In the generative economy, management derives its competitive advantage not from its stock of resources and its ability to transform these into finished goods, but from its ability to translate its stock of deep expertise into ever new strategic combinations. Reflecting this, national wealth derives not so much from the ownership of resources as fr

I have had to make some decisions in the writing of this book. For one, I decided to write it in plain English (or what I hope is plain English). I am a theorist by profession and nature, so I have to admit this has caused me some horror. Writing a book about serious ideas for the general reader was common a hundred or more years ago, but today it

Economics itself is beginning to respond to these changes and reflect that the object it studies is not a system at equilibrium, but an evolving, complex system whose elements—consumers, investors, firms, governing authorities—react to the patterns these elements create.

A technology, I said, is a means to fulfill a purpose: a device, or method, or process. A technology does something. It executes a purpose.

The first and most basic one is that a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose.

So we can say this: Conventional technologies, such as radar and electricity generation, feel like “technologies” because they are based upon physical phenomena. Nonconventional ones, such as contracts and legal systems, do not feel like technologies because they are based upon nonphysical “effects”—organizational or behavioral effects, or even log

It follows in turn that the economy is never quite at stasis. At any time its structure may be in some high degree of mutual compatibility, and hence close to unchanging. But within this stasis lie the seeds of its own disruption, as Schumpeter pointed out a hundred years ago. The cause is the creation of novel combinations—novel arrangements—or fo

The first will be the one I have been talking about: that technologies, all technologies, are combinations. This simply means that individual technologies are constructed or put together—combined—from components or assemblies or subsystems at hand. The second will be that each component of technology is itself in miniature a technology. This sounds