Innovations and industrial performance in Finland 1945-98

This book deals with industrial renewal in Finland during the period 1945-98. One of the most recent trends in the advanced economies has been an accelerating rate of innovations and technological change. Previously, innovation was often generated through a series of discrete steps in research, development, and production. Today, innovation is increasingly generated in networks where value is generated through productive working relationships or collaboration. By analysing the underlying factors of the origins of innovations, development processes, characteristics of innovations, market situations and the characteristics of the firms, this study describes the technical development and the industrial renewal of the Finnish economy from the point of view of industrial innovations. By help of systematically collected data on domestic innovations for the period 1945-98, this study leads us to the origins of Finnish industrial innovations, to those circumstances and situations, where new ideas and products have originated. The results show that there are large variations in innovation activities of companies and characteristics of innovations during different phases of economic development.