The analysis of innovatory activity has remained a hotly disputed subject. The heroic figure of the individual entrepreneur, who was the deus ex machina for Schumpeter, has given way to a more sophisticated viewpoint of complex, increasingly intertwined events, in which a technology based on scientific findings (sciencebased technology) and a mechanized science on the one hand, and the market on the other, operate in mutually reinforcing interaction. Even though individual technological or scientific ‘breakthroughs' can be repeatedly identified, it has long since become clear that appropriate institutional, research-organizational and economic and financial prerequisites are needed in order to be able to hasten benefits from the point of view of the market. Instead of individual invention and its career, it is the dynamics of innovatory development, represented in the temporal trajectories of entire systems of technology, with the probabilities of their implementation, which shape the phenomenon of innovation' in terms both of science and technology and of social organization.1⁶
The temporal peculiarity of innovations is still the fact that they are embedded in the competitive time of the market. Innovations which reach the market have entered the competitive field of economic forces from that moment on, and it is obvious how this force field increasingly is shifting into the offshore area of innovation-creating research. From a macroscopic viewpoint, the contest to oust one another then begins, the struggle for the niches, whether of already existing and occupied markets or of those still to be created, which are intended to react to needs freshly to be aroused. Considered from a closer viewpoint, it turns out that Schumpeter's distinction between entrepreneurs as innovators and their ‘mere imitators' has become completely blurred. Particularly in high-tech fields, the buyers of technological innovations are themselves highly discriminating customers, who for their part can have a lasting influence on the innovative product through their specific demand. But they are also subject, as ultimately are all consumers – to the pressure of competition. Acquiring a consumer item which has just come on the market at a point in time before others do has become a sign of distinction in the context of mass consumption, where the period of time that has elapsed in the acquisition of goods determines the status of consumers.17 The small temporal difference expresses social distinctions, while big economic competition finds expression in the international temporal advantage in the business of scientific and technological innovation.
Cronos's Fear of the New Age
91