The invisible college of the economics of innovation and technological change

The research area of the economics of innovation and technological change (EITC) has flourished over the past decades. While it was a relatively marginal field of economics in the 1950s and 1960s, the field has now grown to become a major part of economic analysis. Because many of the early scholars in the field were rather critical about the standard tools of (neoclassical) economics, EITC has become a research area in which a curious mix of mainstream methodology and alternative approaches co-exists and co-evolves. The paper reports on a survey that was conducted among scholars in the field. We construct networks of scholars, based on weak or strong linkages. Strong linkages are defined as relations between co-workers, weak linkages as relations between people that meet in the circuit of conferences, workshops, etc., or just read each other’s work. We also explore how network linkages are related to opinions on the field, e.g., which are the important journals or important centers of activity.