Imagining a new academic field

The next stage in the study of technological change comes from an economic historian. In 1942, at the suggestion of Sumner Slichter, Rupert Maclaurin, Professor in the Department of Economics at MIT, organized a conference on “the role of technological research in our economy†at the 54th annual meeting of the American Economic Association. According to Maclaurin, “All [participants at the conference] agreed that full employment and an expanding economy are desirable post-war objectives and that considerably more analysis needs to be made of the kind of entrepreneurial motivation and the kind of environmental conditions necessary to achieve an industrial renaissance in manufacturing†(Maclaurin, 1942: 232). The year before, Maclaurin had initiated the first scholarly research program on technological change. In 1941, he obtained a five-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study the “factors and conditions responsible for technological change†. At the time there was almost no scholarly literature on the subject. Technological change was studied, when it was studied at all, in terms of unemployment and labor productivity. Maclaurin’s program of research was entirely different. He was interested in the process leading to technological change, namely the steps necessary to bring an invention to the market. According to Maclaurin, “although economists have long been interested in technological change, there has been very little investigation of the factors influencing the rate of technological progress in particular industries†(Bright and Maclaurin, 1943: 429). “Until quite recently†, stated Maclaurin: