Book Reviews : NASIR TYABJI, Industrialisation and Innovation: The Indian Experience, New Delhi, Sage, 2000, pp. 162

Abstract

Innovation in the sense of the first successful commercialisation of new products, processes, methods or systems in the economy is one of the main sources of dynarnism in capitalist development. Further, during the process of diffusion of an innovation, the new product, process, method or system is itself subject to progressive incremental change (designated an incremental innovation to distinguish this from the former, radical innovation). A successful process of industrialisation in the sense of the growth of ’Modem Industry’ is generally associated with a rapid rate of innovation, radical and incremental. As Marx puts it in Capital (Vol. I, Chapter 13, Section 9): ’Modem Industry never looks upon ... the existing form of a process as final.’ Or, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels ( 1848): ’the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the means of production.’ Classical political economists like Adam Smith and Karl Marx assigned a great deal of importance to the innovation process in the larger growth process. But after Adam Smith and Karl Marx, economists generally did not dare to look