The Evolution of Technology

strategy + business (Kleiner) - To economist W. Brian Arthur, the value of innovation depends on harnessing the natural progression of shared knowledge. 

Arthur’s latest work, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (Free Press, 2009), delves more deeply into the meaning of innovation over time. He observes that new technologies are put together from existing technologies. Thus, the collective body of technological endeavor evolves by creating new elements from within itself. It forms a system that is constantly changing in ways that nobody can quite predict. This evolutionary process provides the impetus in turn for large-scale changes in science, the economy, and much of human culture.