Skip Navigation


Cambridge Journal of Economics Advance Access originally published online on January 10, 2005
Cambridge Journal of Economics 2005 29(3):359-379; doi:10.1093/cje/beh045
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
29/3/359    most recent
beh045v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Lissoni, F.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Related Collections
Right arrow L64 - Other Machinery; Business Equipment; Armaments
Right arrow L82 - Entertainment; Media
Right arrow O31 - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
Right arrow O33 - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved.

The reaper and the scanner: indivisibility-led incremental innovations and the adoption of new technologies

Francesco Lissoni*

* Università degli studi di Brescia and CESPRI-Università L. Bocconi, Milan. Various drafts of this paper were presented and helpfully discussed at the European Meeting on Applied Evolutionary Economics in Grenoble, France; the Annual Meeting of the ‘Società Italiana degli Economisti’ in Ancona, Italy; the European Summer School on Industrial Dynamics in Cargese, Corsica; as well as seminars at SPRU, University of Sussex, UK, and the Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung von Wirtschaftssystemen, Jena, Germany. Extensive comments have come from Bruce Tether, Paul David, Alan Olmstead and two anonymous referees. Work on this paper was made possible by a Visiting Fellowship granted by the Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC), Manchester UK. The usual disclaimers apply

Address for correspondence: CESPRI-Università L. Bocconi, via Sarfatti 25, 20136 Milan, Italy; email: lissoni{at}ing.unibs.it

Widespread adoption of a new capital-embodied technology requires a continuous flow of incremental innovations. A few of them address the key problem of indivisibility, by making renting the new machine a viable alternative to buying it, or by dividing it up into modular elements. Such incremental innovations differ from the learning-by-doing effects usually considered by diffusion models, and greatly affect the structure of the adopting industry. The case for keeping them in due account is made by revisiting Paul David's classic paper on the McCormick reaper, by criticising the subsequent evolution of threshold models of adoption, and by summarising my own findings on the diffusion of electronic pre-press devices.

Key Words: Adoption • Diffusion • Incremental innovations • Industrial dynamics

JEL classifications: O31, 033

Manuscript received September 1, 2000; final version received September 29, 2003.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.