Models of technological change: A critical review of current knowledge

Quantifying technological change as a combinatorial process

“…Results shown in the matrix that stores the RV coefficients for all year pairs (figure 5) point to the following four main findings: 1) As intuition would suggest, in general, when the time between two years increases, their similarity decreases. This is an indication that our method is able to capture the theoretically expected macro-behavior of technological change, which predicts that over time the accumulation of year-to-year changes (both incremental and radical) should lead to an increase in the accumulation of technological changes over time (Parayil, 1993). For example, an examination of the RV coefficient curve for the year 2017 in comparison to all other years, see figure 7, shows that with few exceptions, the farther we move from 2017, the lower is the RV coefficient become.…”