Metamorphosis of Capitalism: Chronicle of Schumpeterian Thinking

This chapter advances Post-Schumpeterian Economics to address the profound transformation of capitalism in the twenty-first century. While Schumpeterian economics has been highly successful in explaining innovation-driven growth and structural change in the second half of the twentieth century, its established framework increasingly fails to capture the scale, complexity, and existential nature of contemporary global challenges. Comprehensive Neo-Schumpeterian Economics (CNSE) represented a first major conceptual advance by integrating industry, financial markets, and the public sector into a three-pillar, co-evolutionary framework that enables an endogenous understanding of structural change, institutional dynamics, and socio-economic transitions driven by technological paradigms. Here we argue that even this extended framework insufficiently addresses the growing fragility and missing resilience of capitalist systems, i.e. the requirement of evolutionary robustness. Repeated global crises—from the dot-com collapse and the global financial crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic—demonstrate that innovation-driven development does not automatically generate positive-sum outcomes. Moreover, the Anthropocene exposes a fundamental blind spot in existing Schumpeterian approaches: the neglect of ecological boundaries and the destabilized relationship between humans and nature. At the same time, currently emerging disruptive technological paradigms introduce new geopolitical and existential risks that exceed the explanatory reach of innovation-centered models. Post-Schumpeterian Economics is introduced as a framework that embeds innovation and economic development within a planetary, social, and geopolitical context. Economic development is reconceptualized as a process of transformation rather than growth alone, guided by the dual objectives of prosperity and security. Security is understood both as planetary security and as geopolitical and existential security. The chapter concludes that Post-Schumpeterian Economics offers a coherent research agenda for integrating innovation dynamics with ecological constraints, social justice, institutional change, and power relations, thereby providing a forward-looking framework for understanding and shaping the future of capitalism under conditions of global existential risks.