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Development and growth are products of the interplay and interaction among heterogeneous actors operating in specific institutional settings. There is a much alluded-to, but under-investigated, link between economic growth, innovation systems, and institutions. There is widespread agreement among most economists on the positive reinforcing link between innovation and growth. However, the importance of institutions as catalysts in this link has not been adequately examined. The concept of innovation systems has the potential to fill this gap. But these studies have not conducted in-depth institutional analyses or focussed on institutional transformation processes, thereby failing to link growth theory to the substantive institutional tradition in economics. In this paper we draw attention to the main shortcomings of orthodox and heterodox growth theories, some of which have been addressed by the more descriptive literature on innovation systems. Critical overviews of the literatures on growth and innovation systems are used as a foundation to propose a new perspective on the role of institutions and a framework for conducting institutional analysis using a multi-dimensional typology of institutions. The framework is then applied to cases of Taiwan and South Korea to highlight the instrumental role played by institutions in facilitating and curtailing economic development and growth.

The arena of mobile telecommunication in Europe has undergone a technological transition from analogue (first generation) to digital (second generation) technologies. While this transition is immediately attributable to shifts in demand and supply patterns, closer examination reveals that there are numerous other intervening factors that have facilitated this transition. This paper utilizes a conceptual framework for institutional analysis developed in earlier work to identify and discuss some of these factors. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications from this study for an institutional perspective on technological change.

A transition to a new technological regime is complete (and stable) when accompanied with a co-stabilization between the mode of regulation and the regime of accumulation. Key to understanding the dynamics of transitions are the factors, including institutions, that “regulate” and stabilize the regime of accumulation over time. However, the available frameworks for institutional analysis employ arbitrary and narrow definition of institutions, focus mainly on the policy domain, and do not pay sufficient attention to the evolutionary characteristics of change as manifested in emergence of numerous institutions that underlie transitions. This paper consists of three parts. The first part critically reviews and synthesizes some of the main approaches for conducting institutional analysis. The second part rearticulates the concept of “transitions”, or technological regime shifts, from a systems perspective to make a case for investigating transitions as multi-level, multi-scale, and multi-system phenomena best understood in their institutional contexts. The third part proposes a framework for examining institutional change and demonstrates how this framework may be used to identify the key factors and conditions whose convergence might result in transitions in a given subsystem. Examples are drawn from the Dutch waste management subsystem to demonstrate how this framework should be operationalized.