EDITORIAL Open Access
Introduction to the special issue from the 2018
ISS conference
Keun Lee
1
& Andreas Pyka
2
#
The Author(s) 2020
It is a great pleasure to launch this special issue of JEEC from the ISS 2018 conference
held in Seoul, South Korea, July 2–4. The theme of the ISS 2018 was “Innovation,
Catch-up, and Sustainable Development”. Keun Lee, one of the guest editors of this
special issue, served as the President of the Society (2016–2018) and also as the main
host or Chairman of the Organizing Committee, for the Seoul conference. Actually, it
took 26 years to return to Asia: the last ISS conference in Asia was held in Kyoto,
Japan in 1992. This turned out to be a good decision for the International Schumpeter
Society: About 380 papers were presented out of the 469 initial submissions from more
than 50 nations around the world. Among these 380 presentations, there were about 90
papers presented by young scholars who are either graduate students and new PhD’s.
At the conferen ce, key note speak ers i ncluded long-stan ding Schumpeterian scholars as
well as those scholars whose research subject is related to the theme of the conference. In
the opening session, Bengt-Åke Lundvall gave a speech on Transformative Innovation
Policy and Global Challe nges: a System’s Perspective, and Sir David Sainsbury talked
about New Economic Thinking: A Dynamic-Capability Theory of Economic Growth.
Other notable scholars gave their talks in special sessions on the following topics:
creative destruction and capitalism, innovation policies and strategies, productivity
slow-down, issues in east Asian economies, Schumpeterian economics, frontiers of
innovation studies, and finally a session in honor of Luigi Orsenigo. Some of the names
are as follows, in the order of the days and time of their speech: Massimo Egidi, Horst
Hanusch, Mike Gregory, Chen Jin, João Carlos Ferraz, Slavo Radosevic, Giovanni
Dosi, Justin Yifu Lin, Hiroyuki Odagiri, Jang-Hee Yoo, John Mathews, Bjørn T.
Asheim, Bo Carlsson, Yoshinori Shiozawa, Ben Martin, Uwe Canter, Franco Malerba,
William Maloney, Andreas Pyka, John Walsh, Kazuyuki Motohashi, Cesar Hidalgo,
Xiaobo Wu, and Mei-Chih Hu.
In the meantime, the Schumpeter Prize of the ISS 2018 went to two eminent scholars
in the field. Professor John Mathews and Michael Best shared the Prize for their books
Journal of Evolutionary Economics
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-020-00699-z
* Andreas Pyka
a.pyka@uni–hohenheim.de
1
Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea
2
Universität Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany
on “Global Green Shift” (Anthem Press, 2017), and “How Growth Really Happens”
(Princeton University Press 2017), respectively. John Mathews has also contributed a
piece to this special issue, on a theme related to his prize winning book, that is,
Schumpeterian economic dynamics of greening.
The President of the Society, Keun Lee, followed the custom of the ISS to deliver
the presidential address. The topic of his address was ‘the Art of Economic Catch-up:
Barriers, Detours and Leapfrogging in Innovation Systems,” and a part of his lecture
was about the measurement and analysis of the national innovation systems. That part
has become the basis for the contribu tion entitled “National Innovation System,
Economic Complexity and Economic Growth” which opens this special issue. This
paper develops a composite NIS index, and shows that it is a powerful predictor of
economic growth, more robust than other measures of economic complexity. The
online-first version of this paper has been awarded the Kapp Prize by the EAEPE
(European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy).
Whereas there are many researches measuring national innovation systems (NIS)
which is a key theoretical concept in Schumpeterian economics, they often use too
many variables from heterogenous sources, which make the measurement very de-
manding, less comparable and less coherent. This article, co-authored by Keun Lee and
Jongho Lee, develops a new, coherent and less-demanding way of measuring NIS of
nations around the world, using five variables, made up from patent citation data, which
show the way knowledge is created, diffused and used in each nation. Each of the five
variables represent different aspects of innovations in each country, such as concentra-
tion, diversification, localization, originality of innovations as well as cycle time of
innovations. These five variables are also combined into one composite NIS index, so
that we may compare and rank countries around the world using this index at a time
and also investigate their change over time. Thus, it also helps policy makers to find out
weak or strong aspects of each nation’s innovation system.
The second contribution to this special issue, authored by the 2018 Schumpeter-
Prize winner, John Mathews, is entitled as “Schumpeterian Economic Dynamics of
Greening: Propagation of Green Eco-platforms,” and takes up the issue of sustainable
development from the conference theme. John Mathews’ approach applies fundamental
Schumpeterian principles of economic development, such as increasing returns, learn-
ing curve effects and emerging innovation and production networks, which contrasts
sharply with the negative perspective of degrowth and zero-growth approaches that got
stuck in the quantitative view of the economic mainstream and therefore are not capable
of understanding the economic opportunities that emerge from the overcoming of the
lock-in in fossil-based technologies.
Darío Vázquez’ contribution focuses on the ongoing economic transformation
process of our days, albeit targeting different industries. He compares the innovation
dynamics and effects on sectorial variation as a source of creativity and competitiveness
of two industries, namely, the defense industry and the health industry. Combining
network analysis and econometrics, the author shows that, due to better connectivity of
health-related industries to other sectors in an economy, their contribution to economic
growth is higher compared to defense industries, which often claim the opposite in
political discussion of budget distributions.
The contribution by Yoshinori Shiozawa is a purely theoretical exercise, which has
become rare in the last years, to gain a better understanding of the transmission
K. Lee, A. Pyka
mechanism between innovation and economic growth. Shiozawa’s theory is value
based and places - very much in a Schumpeterian spirit - central dynamic efficiency.
Allocative efficiency is his theory is self-destructive and dynamic efficiency is main-
tained by innovation alone. The theory not only focused on supply side dynamics, but
includes demand side phenomena in a Pasinetti flavor as well.
Fang Wang’s contribution takes up the catching up topic of the conference. Fang Wang
empirically analyzes the relationship of regulation on product innovation in the Chinese
economy in 2012, a year when China was about to accomplish the target of catching-up to
the world technology frontier. In the analysis a trade-off relation between opportunities
generated by regulations and potential resource misallocation due to increasing transaction
costs is identified, which leads to an inverted U-relationship between regulation and product
innovation in the Chinese case. The increasing difficulties of benefiting from regulation
come from both sides, the administration and the regulated companies, and indicates
problems of rent seeking behavior as well as inflexibilities when confronted with high
complexities of innovation processes.
The contribution by Marlene O’Sullivan touches the sustainable development topic
of the conference. The author analyzes, with a remarkable data base, global develop-
ments in the renewable energy sector over the last 25 years. In particular, she highlights
the developments in the wind energy sector and applies concepts from industr y
dynamics, namely, the idea of industry life cycles. It is most interesting to see that,
in a comparative analysis of various international and national developments, the global
development derived from aggregating national developments. While innovation pro-
cesses in the wind energy industry are global, the dynamics of the national industry
development follow national patterns.
The contribution of Meihan He and Jongsu Lee introduces an agent-based simula-
tion model to study the effects of social culture on innovation. The contribution entitled
“Social Culture and Innovation Diffusion: a Theoretically Founded Agent-based Mod-
el” shows the flexibility of this most important method in evolutionary economics. In
particular, when data availability restricts analysis, agent-based models can fill this gap
and use the sheer unlimited possibilities to generate artificial data to test econometri-
cally relevant hypotheses and to identify important relationships. In the case of Meihan
He and Jongsu Lee, the social culture dimensions are taken from Hofstede’scultural
dimension theory. The authors analyze the impact of individualism, power distance,
and uncertainty avoidance in the diffusion of innovation and compare their outcomes
with real world diffusion data.
The contribution “The Destruction Phase of Public Sector Innovation: Regulations
Governing School Closure in Australia” by Aaron M. Lane is the second contribution
in this special issue that takes up the topic of the relationship between regulation and
innovation. Aron M. Lane has studied a case from Australia that deals with
Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction, most interestingly not with the creative
but with the destructive aspects of the case of the closing of public schools. This
approach for a better understanding of regulatory constraints can be transferred to other
public sector innovations as well and therefore offers a widely applicable template.
Cristiano Antonelli and Christophe Feder return to the conference’s catch-up topic
with their contribution entitled “Total Factor Productivity, Catch-up and Technological
Congruence in Italy, 1861-2010”. So far, the focus of most investigations of catch-up
processes has been on the rate of catching-up and not on the direction of technological
Introduction to the special issue from the 2018 ISS conference
change. Cristiano Antonelli and Christophe Feder present an innovative approach to
measure the effects of direc tion. Their most interesti ng empirical case is Italy’s
economic development from the mid of the nineteenth century until present day.
The contribution, “Acting as an Innovation Niche Seeder: How Can the Reverse Salient
of Southeastern Asian Economies be Overcome? “by Hsien-Chen Lo, Ching-Yan Wu and
Mei-Chih Hu, deals with a typical (co-)evolutionary problem of catching up processes. It is
most likely that the speed of development of single system components differs and that the
success of any system transformation critically depends on the slowest system component.
The authors highlight this co-evolutionary relation in the catching up of South East Asian
economies and analyze as a case study the development in Taiwan.
The following paper by Giorgio Prodi, Francesco Nicolli1 and Federico Frattini is
also focusing on catching-up processes in Asia. This time a regional perspective is
applied on Chinese prefectures. In their contribution “Embeddedness and Local Pat-
terns of Innovation: Evidence from Chinese Prefectural Cities” the authors find evi-
dence for a strong explanatory meaning of the time regions are exposed to innovation,
determining how structures are aligned to innovation dynamics for varying innovation
performance in Chinese prefectural cities for a period of 30 years from the 20th to the
beginning of the twenty-first century.
The last contribution to this special issue takes up the sustainability topic of the
Seoul conference and focuses on the importance of the precautionary principle for
sustainability. Although written more than two years before the Corona pandemic, the
insights are most relevant today when we can observe that companies having imple-
mented sustainability thinking in their business strategies get through the crisis much
better than traditional fossil-resources-based companies. The two authors, Shyama V.
Ramani and Mhamed-Ali El-Aroui, apply their ideas on the seed industry in their
contribution “On the Application of the Precautionary Principle to Ban GMVs: An
Evolutionary Model of New Seed Technology Integration” and model in a game the
conditions for varying outcomes. It is by far not self-evident that the precautionary
principle becomes dominant, in particular if different time horizons influence the
decisions of the agents. For sustainability, however, it is required that our decisions
are not tightly calculated but offer scope for adaption to allow for resilience.
Once again, the papers selected for the special issue of the Schumpeter conference
show the broadness and high standard of Schumpeterian analysis today. The ideas of
dynamics, heterogeneity, novelty and innovation as well as transformation are the most
attractive fields in economics today and offer the most prolific interdisciplinary con-
nections now and for years to come when humankind, our global society, has to master
the transition towards sustainable economic systems by solving the grand challenges
and wicked problems with which we are confronted today.
With the publishing of this special issue following the 2018 Seoul conference, the
12 year term of Andreas Pyka as editor for the International Schumpeter Society ends.
Having edited the special issues from Rio de Janeiro in 2008, Aalborg in 2010,
Brisbane in 2012, Je na i n 2014, Mo ntrea l in 20 16 an d Seoul i n 2018 , alw ays
cooperating closely with the distinguished Presidents of the Society as co-editors, I
want to thank the members of the society for their trust, and, most important, for the
intellectual delicacies that helped me, for more than a decade, to develop an under-
standing for the broadness of evolutionary economics and to escape from the tiny box
of my own field within this wide, diversified and exciting intellectual landscape.
K. Lee, A. Pyka
Funding Information Open Access funding provided by Projekt DEAL.
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Introduction to the special issue from the 2018 ISS conference
