Innovation: principles, processes and policy. a review of the contribution of Prometheus in its first 20 years

This paper reviews the contribution that Prometheus has made over the past 20 years to the literature on innovation, innovation policy and technological change. I offer first a necessarily subjective view of how the research literatures of innovation and innovation policy have developed in recent decades. I then compare that account with an interpretation of the emphases and trends in the corresponding areas in Prometheus. The research literatures involved are vast, located in many specific discipline areas and cross many discipline boundaries. While my ‘home’ discipline is economics I believe much can still be learned from the flexible and imaginative use of economics to frame research inquiry in the innovation area.