Creative destruction: another look at Japan's lost decade
Creative destruction is only half of Schumpeter's message. Far less in vogue is his projection that entrepreneurs will disappear as innovation becomes mechanized in corporate labs - as it has today in Japan - and that ultimately the very success of capitalism will beget socialism. Will creative destruction give way to central planning? Not necessarily, says Harvard's Clayton Christensen. "What happened in Japan is exactly what Schumpeter envisioned," he argues. "But here, folks just leave - they pick up venture capital on the way out, and they start new disruptive corporations." So as long as Washington encourages an infrastructure that supports entrepreneurship, creative destruction can continue after all.
In a paper presented at a recent Fed retreat, former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and his ex-deputy Bradford DeLong observed that "the economy of the future is likely to be 'Schumpeterian,'" with creative destruction the norm and innovation the main driver of wealth. Products based on ideas - music, software, pharmaceuticals - require an enormous investment to develop but very little to keep making. And they're often subject to network effects, which reward those that achieve critical mass. Together, these factors - high cost to create, minimal cost to produce, and a winner-take-all environment - tend to generate natural monopolies, at least until the next innovation comes along. How regulators should respond is debatable, but clearly the rules that governed manufacturing economies don't apply.
[Via WiReD ]