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sions that were actually profit maximizing, and that the economic systemas a whole could be regarded as in moving equilibrium, was totallyinadequate as an abstract characterization of economic growth fueledby technological advance. In particular, that theory repressed the factthat efforts to advance technology were to a considerable extent «blind,»in the sense that it is impossible to predict with great accuracy the bestways to solve particular problems, or in many cases even which problemscan and which can’t be solved.This empirical observation does not deny the powerful bodies ofunderstanding and technique that inventors, and organized R and Dteams, bring to their work, especially in modern times. In particular,such knowledge and technique can serve to focus efforts on promisingpathways and eliminate very quickly obvious dead end. However,the strength of modern science has not proved sufficient to make thebest way to advance a technology obvious and routine. Sophisticatedprofessionals will not be all of accord regarding which way to go. Andhence winners and losers are to a considerable extent determined inex post competition, rather than in forward looking planning.The language of evolutionary theory long has appealed to empiricalscholars of technological advance. Indeed, the broad notion that technologicaladvance proceeds through an evolutionary process has beendeveloped independently by scholars of technological advance operatingin a variety of different disciplines. The emerging evolutionary theoryof economic growth was based on this conception of technologicaladvance, but went on to incorporate business firms, competing witheach other largely on the basis of their product and process technologies.To use the language of Schumpeter, evolutionary economic growththeory viewed economic growth not as a smooth equilibrium process,but as one based on creative destruction.By the early 1980s the basic ideas of evolutionary economic werein place. While evolutionary conceptions of how growth proceedsmostly were applied to economies at the technological frontiers, theyalso were used more broadly to analyze the economic developmentprocess. Thus, Goto and Odagiri have described how Japanese industrygradually caught up with the West through a cumulative learningDebates2 6 8Sociedade, Tecnologia e Inovação Empresarial