Regimes reloaded! A reappraisal of Schumpeterian patterns of innovation, 1977–2011

One of the most significant results of the empirical literature on innovation studies of the 1980s and 1990s was that innovation patterns were characterized by important inter-sectoral differences. This finding prompted a lively research agenda that: i) provided empirical characterizations of sectoral patterns of innovation by means of taxonomic exercises; ii) sought to interpret sectoral patterns of innovation as emerging properties of underlying selection and learning processes reflecting the structural properties of technical change at sectoral level (“technological regimes”). In this paper, we reconsider one of the landmark works on technological regimes (e.g., Breschi et al. 2000), reassess its findings, and perform a quasi-replication of their its exercise. Our conclusion is that the proposed distinction between Schumpeterian patterns of innovation (Mark I vs. Mark II) and their interpretation in terms of technological regimes has still the promise of yielding important insights concerning on the connection between inventive activities and industrial dynamics.