Technological innovations: occurrences, theories, and influences

Efforts in studying the innovation process were initially modeled after classical physics, and sought a cause-effect relationship between R&D money and institutional infrastructure as inputs to a national system of innovation. It was expected that such inputs would then lead to an inexorable linear progression of technologically generated prosperity. And indeed some high-tech seedling companies did appear, but not enough. In fact, some grew to adolescence, if not maturity, but not enough. In this paper, the authors review how this model proved to be too simple and was superseded by the so-called “chain link model”. In the chain link model, innovation is seen as more complex and resulted from the interplay of many factors, including R&D money as an input, and commercial interests as an economic motivation