Complexity Perspectives in Innovation and Social Change

• From Biology to Society.- From Population to Organization Thinking.- The Innovation Innovation.- The Long-Term Evolution of Social Organization.- Biological Metaphors in Economics: Natural Selection and Competition.- Innovation in the Context of Networks, Hierarchies, and Cohesion.- Innovation and Urban Systems.- The Organization of Urban Systems.- The Self Similarity of Human Social Organization and Dynamics in Cities.- Innovation Cycles and Urban Dynamics.- Innovation and Market Systems.- Building a New Market System: Effective Action, Redirection and Generative Relationships.- Incorporating a New Technology into Agent-Artifact Space: The Case of Control System Automation in Europe.- Innovation Policy: Levels and Levers.- Modeling Innovation and Social Change.- The Future of Urban Systems: Exploratory Models.- Modeling Innovation.- An Agent-Based Model of Information Flows in Social Dynamics.- Exaptive Processes: An Agent Based Model.- Power Laws in Urban Supply Networks, Social Systems, and Dense Pedestrian Crowds.- Using Statistical Physics to Understand Relational Space: A Case Study from Mediterranean Prehistory.

From the reviews: "This important book presents an articulated and original approach to understanding innovation as a collective, systemic, and evolutionary process engendered by generative relations that enable agents and social systems to overcome the challenges of the limits to growth. ... this book makes an important contribution. It provides new foundations to implementing a broader evolutionary approach to economics ... . this book makes a substantial contribution to implementing a systemic theory of innovation." (Cristiano Antonelli, Regional Studies, Vol. 44 (4), May, 2010)