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The Free-Market Innovation Machine: Analyzing the Growth Miracle of Capitalism

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Author: William J. Baumol
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book

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Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars

2 reviews
Sales Rank: 365693

Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.4 x 1

ISBN: 0691096155
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.122
EAN: 9780691096155
ASIN: 0691096155

Publication Date: April 1, 2002
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days

Also Available In:

•	Paperback - The Free-Market Innovation Machine: Analyzing the Growth Miracle of Capitalism

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Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars

Packed with Knowledge! May 19, 2004
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

This book should certainly be on every businessperson's reading list, and every legislator's, and every student's. It is a lucid, well-organized and admirably logical presentation of the role of innovation in capitalism, and the role of capitalism in innovation. Author William J. Baumol accomplishes something rare indeed by spanning the chasm between quantitative and qualitative economic writing. He has the verbal skill to write clearly and accessibly, explaining his points in plain if elevated and austere language, and illustrating them with interesting historical examples. His rigorous mathematical demonstration would satisfy the most demanding academic economist. Baumol's insight that capitalism's great achievement is to make innovation routine distinguishes this book from others on innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity. Although the lone inventor matters, ancient Rome and China had lone inventors and yet those empires did not produce economic growth on the scale that capitalism has produced it. Capitalism is distinctly productive because it makes innovation a self-sustaining and indispensable phenomenon, driving and driven by competition. We find this intriguing thesis well worth serious consideration.

5 out of 5 stars

Innovation - the important condition for industrial survival July 23, 2002
11 out of 11 found this review helpful

Professor Baumol has written the definitive text upon the role of innovation in the economic process. Joseph Schumpeter wrote of waves of creative destruction that reshaped the face of industry - the spark of which is innovation. Clayton Christesen in the "The Innovators Dilemma" and Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan in "Creative Destruction" built on those themes - in particular the vulnerability of incumbents to attack from outsiders.Baumol advances Schumpeter's cause by demonstrating that innovation rather than price competition is the central feature of the market process. He also highlights the present/future tension inherent in every business in that innovation is in itself a present cost to be weighed against uncertain future benefits. Innovation is, he argues, no longer undertaken as a means of securing extraordinary profits but as a means of preempting competition. In this way innovation becomes the most important condition for industrial survival.
The book is not pitched at the lay reader, nor however is it set in a snow storm of algebra.