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Schumpeter was one of the foremost economics theorists who pointed out the particular
economic role of entrepreneurs in pushing forward business related innovation as an engine
for economic development. Namely entrepreneurs are capable of initiating large-scale
(“radical”) or small (“incremental”) innovations that have a particular impact on the further
structural changes in individual industries, market segments, and even in the whole
economic system through a dynamic process which he labelled a “creative destruction”. In
line with this approach, innovation “in short, any “doing things differently” in the realm of
economic life” (Schumpeter, 1939, pp. 80). So innovations are not necessarily based on new
scientific discoveries.
Herewith, Schumpeter was one of the first scholars who further evolved a study on
contradistinguishing of invention and innovation in the field of economics introduced in
1929 in J. Stamp’s work Some Economic Factors in Modern Life. According to Schumpeter
(1939, pp. 80-82) the social processes which produce inventions and innovations do not
stand in any invariant relation to each other. Invention is “an element without importance
to economic analysis. … As soon as it is divorced from invention, innovation is readily seen
to be a distinct internal factor of *economic+ change”. In the due titled chapter The theory of
innovation Schumpeter (1939) defined innovation as “the intrusion into the system of new
production functions which incessantly shift existing cost curves” (pp. 88). Thus, in
evolutionary stand disturbances of equilibrium arising from innovation (as a process) must
“disrupt the existing system and enforce a distinct process of adaptation” (pp. 98).
According to Godin (2008), since the early 1940s economic historian W.R. Maclaurin
devoted himself to studying technological change in its economic dimensions. That enabled
Maclaurin to introduce the linear model of innovation in which the process was broken
down into distinct and sequential steps, from fundamental research through production
engineering and commercialising to diffusion in 1953 in the paperThe sequence from
invention to innovation and its relation to economic growth. Maclaurin also constructed one
of the first taxonomies for measuring technological innovation. In the sequel other
researchers developed these ideas in own theories or conceptual models of innovation.
Extending R. Rothwell’s typology of innovation models’ generations presented in 1992 in his
paper Succesful industrial innovation: Critical factors in the 1990s, Marinova and Phillimore
(2003) identified six generations of innovation models, namely:
1. First generation – the black box model;
2. Second generation – linear models (including technology push and need pull);
3. Third generation - interactive models (including coupling and integrated models);
4. Fourth generation –systems models (including networks and national systems of
innovation);
5. Fifth generation –evolutionary models;
6. Sixth generation – innovative milieux. ( 45)
It becomes apparent from the overview of the six generations of the innovation models how
complex the phenomenon of innovation is and how difficult it is to master it in a frame of a
particular even most explicit and comprehensive model. In general innovation models have
passed from a concentration on factors within a control of the firm (i.e. R&D, management,
marketing, etc) to implication of factors external to the firm (i.e. science and technology
institutions, networking, government policy, and even human, social and cultural factors).
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