ABSTRACT

The didactical seminar is focused on the role played by ‘history-friendly’ models in the "Economics of Innovation" field. As clearly affirmed in the seminal paper written at the beginning of the XXI century by Malerba, Orsenigo, Nelson and Winter on the computer industry, "history-friendly models are formal models that aim to capture, in stylized form, qualitative and ‘appreciative’ theories about the mechanisms and factors affecting industry evolution, technological advance and institutional change put forth by empirical scholars of industrial economics, technological change, business organization and strategy, and other social scientists". In the seminar, nature and mechanism of history friendly model will be explained, using the famous case study on the computer industry dynamic change as a key reference.