Post-Schumpeterian Economics
In the first quarter of the 21st century, descriptions of the future are both dystopian and utopian. Dystopias are based on the consequences of man-made climate change and derive bleak prospects of doom for global society. Rising temperatures, loss of biodiversity, crop failures, migration and related military conflicts are responsible for developments leading to extremely threatening scenarios. Utopias do not deny man-made climate change, but see the development of new knowledge and new technologies as the solution to the manifold problems. Technology-driven change leads to a restructuring of global social and economic orders, food security, sustainable lifestyles and a fair distribution of income.
Without a doubt, the utopian scenario is preferable, even if it will not happen by itself and is ultimately based on the same threatening global problems. The focus is on knowledge and technology development, as the transformation to a sustainable economic and social order is by no means compatible with maintaining today's lifestyles in the so-called developed world, and continuing with the conventional idea of economic growth is not a solution. However, the transformation to a sustainable economic and social order cannot be reconciled with the hygge concept of growth-critical approaches, which aim for a return to pre-industrial times. Innovation and knowledge are central components of a desirable and promising transformation process.
From an economic theory perspective, as was the case when overcoming the economic crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, there is once again a need to return to the ideas of Joseph Alois Schumpeter, who, in the first half of the 20th century, placed the creative destruction of innovations in capitalist economic systems at the center of his theory of economic development. The return to Schumpeter's ideas in the last decades of the 20th century led to the highly successful neo-Schumpeterian concept of innovation systems, in which private actors and the state bring about knowledge-driven structural change that creates jobs, international competitiveness and, ultimately, rising incomes.
The Schumpeterian concept of economic development is particularly promising for the current situation for another reason: economic development takes place away from notions of equilibrium and finds its starting point and provisional end point in cyclically recurring crises. In this respect, the Schumpeterian concept is a synthesis of dystopia and utopia, which makes it so interesting in the current situation of polymorphic crises. What was not addressed neither in Schumpeter's theory nor in neo-Schumpeterian works are the endogenous forces of destruction of natural resources and conditions of life on a global scale, which cannot be overcome by structural change (new industries replacing old industries). The idea of transformation goes beyond the concept of structural change. It includes consumer behaviour (lifestyles) and its innovative adaptation, as well as other system boundaries that no longer represent only the economic system, but also include the (natural) environment in which these developments take place.
As theoretical starting point for the transformation to a sustainable economy and society, we are developing our post-Schumpeterian approach, which eclectically combines Schumpeter's ideas on innovation-driven, crisis-ridden development processes with Georgescu-Roegen's concept of an ecological economic order and the systemic approach of innovation systems.
The Special Session
Special Session Proposal:
Post-Schumpeterian Economics - Combining sustainability and innovation for relevant economic sciences in times of multiple global crises
by
Horst Hanusch (University of Augsburg) and Andreas Pyka (University of Hohenheim)
e-mail: horst.hanusch@t-online.de and a.pyka@uni-hohenheim.de
As has so often been the case in the past, economics today is once again very inadequately prepared to respond to the world's major challenges and provide relevant answers. It is not possible to simply apply the recipes for success of the past, as the global challenges categorically rule out ‘business as usual’. Unfortunately, this critical assessment also applies to the Neo-Schumpeterian approach (Hanusch & Pyka, 2007), which has been the authoritative intellectual source in economics since the 1990s due to its optimism based on innovative change. Growth and development in the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union was decisively and in many cases successfully shaped by neo-Schumpeterianism. Three decades later, the situation is completely different and it appears that this economic development has overstepped important planetary boundaries (Rockström et al. 2009) and is jeopardising the future of humanity as a whole.
Does this mean that Schumpeter's ideas no longer play a role today and can no longer contribute to overcoming the world's multiple crises? Certainly not, and we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Innovation and technological change are obviously part of the problem, but they are also part of the solution. The huge challenges of our time have given rise to technological and social developments that can be expected to make an important contribution to overcoming them. Renewable energies, the bioeconomy, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology are examples for recent technological mega-trends, while the sharing economy, new mobility and nutritional behaviour as well as social innovation are important examples of path breaking social trends.
However, it is clear that a new perspective must be adopted for a relevant consideration, in which the concepts of growth and development must take a back seat to the concept of transformation in order to come closer to achieving sustainability goals. This new perspective is expressed in two powerful visions of our time: Yuval Noah Harari's ‘Homo Deus’ (2015), which depicts a future characterised by cooperation between humans and machines, and David Christian's ‘Big History’ (2018), which warns of climate and environmental collapse. These perspectives reflect a deeper conflict - that between innovation and ecological limits. Economics had been wrestling with this duality long before Big History. Already in the 1930s, this duality was expressed by two thinkers - Joseph Schumpeter and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and, unfortunately, has not been connected in the aftermath. Schumpeter advocated innovation as the centrepiece of capitalism. His concept of ‘creative destruction’ explains how entrepreneurs destroy old systems in order to drive progress. Equally important, but so far largely ignored, is Georgescu-Roegen, who pointed out the limitations of this development. He argued that economic growth ultimately collides with natural limits. His thermodynamic view of entropy warned us that unbridled progress risks collapse. Today, their views clash: rapid technological change on the one hand, increasing ecological crises on the other. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, extreme weather events - these are no longer predictions, but reality. And they harbour far-reaching risks, not only for the environment, but also in political, economic and social terms, to which we must find new answers.
In this special session, we present our post-Schumpeterian approach and provide an impetus for its further development. The Globelics Conference 2025 with the theme ‘Innovation for sustainable and inclusive development to build resilience for global challenges’ provides an ideal framework for our project to publish a comprehensive Companion to Post-Schumpeterian Economics. 18 years after the publication of our Elgar Companion to Neo-Schumpeterian Economics (2007), the need for this is obvious. A simple new edition of Neo-Schumpeterianism will not serve the cause, but a radically different approach is necessary and requires this step. The proposed panel should therefore not only serve to discuss Post-Schumpeterian Economics, but also to attract authors whose ideas make an important contribution to the Post-Schumpeterian approach. Our Post-Schumpeterian approach combines the seven conference themes of Globelics 2025 (innovation and inequality reduction, climate crisis and sustainable innovation, geopolitical disruptions and resilient innovation systems, digital transformation and data infrastructure, innovation policy for global development goals, multi-level innovation systems, innovation capabilities in firms and economies, theoretical and methodological advances in innovation and development studies) and promises a fruitful and inspiring discussion in the special session on Post-Schumpeterian economics. For the participants of Globelics 2025, the special session offers an inspiring opportunity to further their own research and to integrate it into a larger framework.
The special session is organised as follows: It will start with a short presentation entitled ‘The Principles of Post-Schumpeterian Economics’ by Horst Hanusch and Andreas Pyka complemented by an impulse of Bengt-Ake Lundvall from Aalborg University with his reflections on Post-Schumpeterian innovation systems. This will be followed by five short presentations on the application of the Post-Schumpeterian transformation approach especially in South America, Southeast Asia and Africa and generally in the G-20 countries, in order to shed some light on the current geo-political situation between emerging nations (BRICS countries) and industrialized economies (G-7 countries). Diogo Ferraz from the University of Sao Paulo and Orachos Napasintuwong from Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Glenda Kruss from Johannesburg University will lecture on their perspectives followed by Yasushi Hara from Kobe University who will report on the main results of his informative transformation data set covering the G-20 countries. At the end, Horst Hanusch and Andreas Pyka will present a call for papers, soliciting contributions for the Companion on Post-Schumpeterian Economics.
References:
Christian, D. (2018), Origin Story: A Big History of Everything; Little, Brown and Company.
Hanusch, H. and Pyka, A. (2007), The Principles of Neo-Schumpeterian Economics. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 31(2), 275-289.
Hanusch, H. and Pyka, A. (2007). Elgar companion to neo-Schumpeterian economics. Edward Elgar Publishing: Cheltenham UK.
Harari, Y. N. (2015), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Geffen Publishing House
Rockström J., et al. (2009) “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity”, in Ecology and Society 14(2).
Speakers
Prof. em. Dr. University of Augsburg, Germany
| Professor emeritus, Institute of Economics, University of Augsburg. During his academic career he wrote and published numerous books and articles on Public Economics and Schumpeterian Theory. He is the co-founder (together with Wolfgang Stolper) of the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society and was its Secretary General until 2022. He is also the Founding Editor of the Journal of Evolutionary Economics and Honorary President of the International Institute of Public Finance. His current research interests focus on a Post-Schumpeterian frame for Public Finance as well as Economic Development Theory.
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Professor Dr. Andreas Pyka University of Hohenheim, Germany
| Andreas Pyka is Professor for Innovation Economics at the University of Hohenheim, Germany. His research interests include transformation processes towards a sustainable and climate neutral economy, the role of innovation for transformation and the application of new methodologies to overcome the limitations of mainstream economics in the analysis of lung run developments. He is involved in several national and international research projects dealing with the impacts of the bioeconomy, artificial intelligence and robots, and mobility and energy change. His theoretical background is evolutionary and complexity economics. He graduated with a PhD in economics at the University of Augsburg where he also finished his habilitation in 2004. In the last years he was visiting professor at the Technical University of Delft, the Università degli studi dell'Insubria in Varese and the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Innovation Economics and Management (Revue d'Economie et de Management de l'Innovation) and member of the editorial board of the Journal of Evolutionary Economics. Andreas Pyka also actively is engaged in scientific associations, he served more than 10 years as editor (elected) of the international Schumpeter Society, he has been President of the Think tank Lisbon Civic Forum and chairman of the Evolutionary Economics Group in Germany and he coordinated the Research Area Innovation and Technological Change of the EAEPE. He is Vice President of the University of Hohenheim since 2012 and coordinator of the Bachelor program in economics at he German Turkish University in Istanbul.
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Dr. Diogo Ferraz University of Sao Paulo (USP)
| Professor at the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), Dr. Diogo Ferraz possesses in-depth and comprehensive expertise in economic complexity and diversification, integrating social (human development) and environmental aspects through quantitative methods. He is an economist with a PhD in engineering sciences from the University of São Paulo (Brazil), Dr. Ferraz has extensive experience in combining impact-oriented and evidence-based projects in developing countries, with funding from CNPq, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), and other organizations. As a professor, he teaches econometrics and economic complexity in undergraduate and postgraduate programs in Brazil. He leads the Center for Studies on Productive Structure, Human Development, and Sustainable Development (NEPDHS), which comprises researchers, master's, and PhD students. His research focuses on complexity and productive structure, innovation, economic and sustainable development, and bioeconomy. He has authored around fifty scientific publications in prestigious journals. Dr. Ferraz's extensive knowledge enables him to provide straightforward policy recommendations to promote economic diversification and sustainable development.
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Associate Professor Yasushi HARA Faculty of Business Administration, Kobe University, Japan | Tenured Associate Professor, Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe University. Prior to his current position, which he has held since April 2022, he served as a Research Associate at the Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University; a researcher at the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Research Center (SciREX Center) at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS); a Michelin Fellow at the France-Japan Research Center on Contemporary Japan (CEAFJP/EHESS) at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris; and a Lecturer at the Graduate School of Economics, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan. Published in the Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Cell Stem Cell, R&D Management etc…
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Dr. Glenda Kruss University of Johannesburg | Glenda Kruss recently retired from the Human Sciences Research Council, after 24 years of research and executive leadership in the public research institute sector. Her research is grounded in the field of innovation studies, to understand the role of universities and public research institutes in economic and social development, and the determinants of skills and knowledge flows within sectoral, national and global systems of innovation. In 2016, she was appointed to lead the Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators, funded by the national Department of Science, Technology and Innovation in South Africa, to conduct R&D and business innovation surveys. Under her leadership, CeSTII’s research focus was broadened and extended, to experiment with the design of contextually appropriate datasets, measures and indicator frameworks of STI for inclusive and sustainable development, in South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, aligned with the SDGs. She collaborates with NEPAD-AUDA and the SADC, as well as government and policy actors in individual African countries, to build research and indicator capabilities. She has collaborated widely on comparative research projects in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe, and had led large scale projects for national government, building alliances and networks between researchers, policy makers and practitioners in South Africa and the global South. She is an editor of Innovation and Development for the past ten years, promoting innovation research grounded in and oriented to African challenges, is an internationally rated scholar (National Research Foundation, South Africa), and an active participant in the Academy of Sciences of South Africa. Her research will continue to focus on conceptualising new STI indicators appropriate to African and global South development imperatives and innovation challenges.
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Associate Professor Dr. Orachos Napasintuwong | Orachos Napasintuwong is an Associate Professor, Deputy Department Head of International Affairs, and Ph.D. program chair at the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Kasetsart University in Thailand. Her teaching and research are centered on applied economics and policy for sustainable agri-food system transformation, bioeconomy, and agricultural innovation, particularly in Southeast Asia. She is the lead scientist of the Agri-food Policy Research Unit at Kasetsart University's Center for Advanced Studies in Agriculture and Food, as well as an executive member of the Agricultural Economic Society of Thailand under Royal Patronage, Asia Pacific Agricultural Policy Forum, and Thailand's country partner for the Food and Fertilizer Technology Centre for the Asian and Pacific Region (FFTC)'s Agricultural Policy Platform. She is also the book review editor for Asian Journal of Agriculture and Development, as well as the social science country editor for the Journal of the International Society for Southeast Asian Agricultural Sciences, Thailand Chapter. In 2011, she was a research fellow at the Graz Schumpeter Centre at the University of Graz. She has produced two textbooks, Economics of Agricultural Technology, and Innovation and Economic and Policy Analysis of Agricultural Biotechnology (in Thai). She holds a second-class honors Bachelor of Science in Biotechnology from Mahidol University, an MBA from Louisiana State University, and a Ph.D. in Food and Resource Economics from the University of Florida. Her research on Immigrant Workers and Technological Change: An Induced Innovation Perspective on Florida and US Agriculture received Honorable Mention for Outstanding Dissertation.
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