Introduction: Foundations of Economic Change—Behavior, Interaction and Aggregate Outcomes

The theme of the 15th International Joseph A. Schumpeter Conference, held from July 27 to 30, 2014 in Jena (Germany), was “Foundations of Economic Change—Behavior, Interaction and Aggregate Outcomes”. This topic was intended first to cover core dimensions of innovation driven evolutionary economic development and to be broad enough to attract a wide range of papers from evolutionary economics, economics of innovation, science and technology studies, complexity economics, behavioral economics, institutional economics, regional economics, and others more. Secondly, the topic was chosen in order to represent the research achievements, agendas and programs that have been developed in Jena since 1991: institutionally to mention here are the Max Planck Institute of Economics with its focus on evolutionary and behavioral economics as well as entrepreneurship, completed by and cooperating with research projects on economics of innovation, behavioral economics and entrepreneurship at the Department of Economics and Business Administration at the Friedrich Schiller University, as well as the University’s research major “Social and Economic Change” with research projects in psychology, sociology, law, regional sciences, ethics, and political sciences; major research training groups located in Jena that trained and advised young scholars from all over the world have been pushing these research topics: the DFG graduate school (GRK 1411) “The Economics of Innovative Change”, the International Max Planck Research School on “Adapting Behavior in a Fundamentally Uncertain World”, and the Jena Graduate School “Human Behavior in Social and Economic Change”. Third, and finally, the choice of behavior, interaction and aggregate outcomes followed a specific rationale: that of representing the multilevel focus of analysis and the ‘division of labor’ of Neo-Schumpeterian and Evolutionary economists that over the years committed themselves to uncover the dynamic nature of economic phenomena from the individual and single technology (in production and consumption) up to changes in whole systems. In this sense, the title of the conference was at the same time a tribute to (and a suggestion to proceed on) the inquiry of the Economy from a systemic and systematic viewpoint.