Innovation and Quality Standardisation: The Evolution of Complex Industrial Systems and Complex Product Designs

Esben Sloth Andersen

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 1994)

The purpose of the present paper is to suggest ways in which evolutionary economics can cope with economic complexity in a more complex and less stylised way than appears to be the result of the studies in relation to Artificial Life and Adaptive Economic Agents (Holland and Miller, 1991; Arthur, 1993; cf. Waldrop, 1992). The paper proposes to introduce the high level of qualitative complexity which characterises economic system through a combination of aspects of Smithian-Marshallian and Schumpeterian approaches to economic evolution treated by means of some tools of modern evolutionary economics.