• How did the United States overtake Europe to become the world’s technological leader within just a few decades? • A new study by researcher Frank Neffke from the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) and colleagues from the Growth Lab at Harvard University published in the journal Research Policy suggests that the answer lies not primarily in technological breakthroughs but in a fundamental shift in how innovation itself was organized.

Article Summaries:

  • A new study by Frank Neffke of the Complexity Science Hub and colleagues from Harvard’s Growth Lab, published in Research Policy, argues that the United States’ rapid rise to global technological leadership was driven more by a re‑organization of innovation than by any single breakthrough. The authors trace how industrial research laboratories-originally developed in Europe-were adopted and transformed in the U.S., creating a networked system that accelerated knowledge diffusion and product development. The paper contends that this structural shift, rather than superior inventions, enabled the U.S. to outpace Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

Sources: