withoutcontinuousbasicresearchtechnology.docVIP

WITHOUT CONTINUOUS BASIC RESEARCH TECHNOLOGY WILL STAGNATE AND ECONOMY WILL BE IN NO GROWTH. WHY? J?rgen Lindgaard Pedersen Associate Professor Department of Management Engineering Technical University of Denmark Produktionstorvet DTU Building 423, room 031 DK – 2800 Kongens Lyngby Denmark 1 INTRODUCTION Today it is a consensus view in the economic profession that growth in knowledge is a necessary but not a sufficient precondition for growth in GNP. In most cases the transmission mechanism from growth in knowledge to growth in GNP seems to work through development in technology. In the mid-eighties the so-called New Growth Economy was established by Paul M Romer. The most important idea in this economic school is that knowledge is the most important fuel in the economic growth engine. A prognosis for the future has been drawn by Romer saying that there are no arguments for economic stagnation. Instead we can have the possibility of a path toward constant improvement and unlimited potential if we only will make better ideas expressed as technological progress. From the end of 1990s Joel Mokyr published several papers which later became foundation for the book The Gifts of Athena . In antique Greece Athena was goddess of wisdom. What Mokyr does is that he looks on what he calls useful knowledge which is about knowledge about natural phenomena and regularities (what-knowledge or propositional knowledge) and instructional knowledge telling about what to do if we want to get specific results (how-knowledge or prescriptive knowledge). The idea is that society can leave a technological paradigm with diminishing returns in production and in developing potentials. But to jump to a more productive technology society has to develop this technology. And such development presupposes propositional knowledge about nature which can be used by creative developers of new technology to substitute the outdated technology. The point is th