Technologies, Products and Organization in the Innovating Firm: What Adam Smith Tells Us and Joseph Schumpeter Doesn't

Abstract

Adam Smith's insights into the increasingly specialized nature of knowledge production are crucially important in understanding the contemporary problems of managing innovating firms. Products and firms are based on an increasing range of fields of specialized technological understanding. Competition is not based on technological diversity, but on diversity and experimentation in products, etc. Firms rarely fail because of an inability to master a new field of technology, but because the do not succeed in matching the firm's systems of coordination and control to the nature of the available technological opportunities.