The creative response: the Schumpeterian legacy

Abstract This paper presents and frames the results of the recent book The creative response: knowledge and innovation by Antonelli and Colombelli (2023). The book combines the advances of the economics of knowledge and innovation, implementing the Schumpeterian notion of creative response to understand the determinants and the effects of the rate and direction of technological and organizational change and its variance across time and space, firms and industries. The notion of creative response, introduced by Joseph Schumpeter in the essay “The creative response in economic history” published in 1947 by The Journal of Economic History , can be regarded as the synthesis of his life-long work on innovation. It provides an inclusive framework that enables to highlight the crucial role of knowledge in assessing the rate and direction of technological change and to clarify that no innovation is possible without the generation of new knowledge, while the generation of new knowledge augments the chances of innovation but does not yield automatically the introduction of innovation. Firms thus are faced with a number of strategic decisions to make the creative response possible. The position paper elaborates the analytical core of the notion of creative response and articulates its implications for economic policy and strategic management.