INOVAÇÃO E DIFUSÃO
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NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES
INNOVATION AND DIFFUSION
Bronwyn H. Hall
Working Paper 10212
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10212
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
January 2004
Forthcoming in Fagerberg, Jan, David C. Mowery, and Richard R. Nelson, Handbook on Innovation, Oxford:
Oxford University Press. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of
the National Bureau of Economic Research.
©2003 by Bronwyn H. Hall. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may
be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.
Innovation and Diffusion
Bronwyn H. Hall
NBER Working Paper No. 10212
January 2004
JEL No. O3, L1
ABSTRACT
The contribution made by innovation and new technologies to economic growth and welfare is
largely determined by the rate and manner by which innovations diffuse throughout the relevant
population, but this topic has been a somewhat neglected one in the economics of innovation. This
chapter, written for a handbook on innovation, provides a historical and comparative perspective on
diffusion that looks at the broad determinants of diffusion, economic, social, and institutional,
viewed from a microeconomic perspective. A framework for thinking about these determinants is
presented along with a brief nontechnical review of modeling strategies used in different social
scientific literatures. It concludes with a discussion of gaps in our understanding and potential future
research questions.
Bronwyn H. Hall
Department of Economics
549 Evans Hall, #3880
University of California-Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
and NBER
bhhall@econ.berkeley.edu
Hall on Diffusion December 2003
2
Innovation and Diffusion
Bronwyn H. Hall1
1. Introduction
In 1953, a young female Macaque monkey in the south of Japan washed a muddy
sweet potato in a stream before eating it. This obvious improvement in food preparation was
imitated quickly by other monkeys and in less than 10 years it became the norm in her
immediate group; by 1983, the method had diffused completely. In 1956, the same monkey
innovated again, inventing a technique in which handfuls of mixed sand and wheat grains
were cast upon the sea, so that the floating cereal could be skimmed from the surface. Again,
by 1983, this method of gleaning wheat had diffused almost completely throughout the local
populations of Macaques.2 Besides the obvious fact that humankind does not have a
monopoly on innovation, these examples illustrate a couple of things about the diffusion of
innovations: first, when they are clearly better than what went before, new ideas of how to do
things will usually spread via a “learning by observing” process, and second, the process can
take some time; in these cases it took thirty years, and the life cycle of the Macaque monkey
is somewhat shorter than ours (Kawai, Watanabe, and Mori 1992).
Turning to the world of humans, it is safe to say that without diffusion, innovation
would have little social or economic impact. In the study of innovation, the word diffusion is
commonly used to describe the process by which individuals and firms in a society/economy
adopt a new technology, or replace an older technology with a newer. But diffusion is not
only the means by which innovations become useful by being spread throughout a
1 University of California at Berkeley, Scuola Sant’anna Superiore Pisa, NBER, and the Institute of
Fiscal Studies, London. I am grateful to Beethika Khan for contributing some of the literature review that lies
behind the issues discussed in this paper, and other contributors to this volume, especially my discussants,
Kristine Bruland, John Cantwell, and Ove Granstrand, for their very helpful comments. Finally I owe an
immense debt to the editors of this volume (Jan Fagerberg, David Mowery, and Richard Nelson) for their
careful reading of multiple drafts of this chapter.
2 I am grateful to Chris E. Hall for calling this example to my attention. It is described in McGrew
(1998), where a more complete set of references to the anthropological literature is given. A third feature of this
Hall on Diffusion December 2003
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population, it is also an intrinsic part of the innovation process, as learning, imitation, and
feedback effects which arise during the
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