Beyond Schumpeter: Toward Complex Evolving Systems? Or back to Equilibrium Economics?

The 40th birthday of the Schumpeter Society offers an excellent chance to reflect on Schumpeter intellectual heritage , as well as its shortcomings and the subsequent developments. No doubt that reference to Schumpeter has been a precious shortcut to the rediscovery of the crucial importance of innovation for economic dynamics . However , such a rediscovery may be the harbinger of a fuller appreciation of the economy as a complex evolving system , or, on the contrary, be re-incorporated into an enlarged canonic ‘equilibrium’ paradigm. The bifurcation concerns the domains of measurement ( including the appropriate statistics and econometrics ) , modelling , and finally , policies . In this work we discuss such crossroads , the dangerous twists that the Schumpeter- inspired tradition has taken , together with some promising evolutionary alternatives .