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10 - Doing Capitalism: Notes on the Practice of Venture Capitalism (Revised and Extended)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2012

William H. Janeway
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Preface

I could not ignore the invitation to contribute to a Festschrift in honour of Carlota Perez. For Carlota's work stands at the hinge of my own career-long engagement at the interface of finance and technology. In Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (Perez 2002), she defined an agenda too neglected in the history of economic development and in the analysis of the dynamics of capitalism. In doing so, she provided a framework for understanding the complex feedback loops that link technological innovations, embodied both in physical assets and business models, with the financial assets created to fund them and the necessarily speculative trading of those assets that follows on their distribution.

In her working paper on ‘Finance and Technology: A Neo-Schumpeterian Perspective’, Carlota Perez wrote:

In Schumpeter's basic definition of capitalism as ‘that form of private property economy in which innovations are carried out by means of borrowed money’, we find his characteristic separation of borrower and lender, entrepreneur and banker, as the two faces of the innovation coin. This is not, however, how his legacy has been interpreted and enriched by the great majority of Neo-Schumpeterians. The accent has almost invariably been on the entrepreneur to the neglect of the financial agent, no matter how obviously indispensable this agent may be to innovation.

(Perez 2004, 2)

This contribution is intended to put some flesh on the bones of that abstract ‘financial agent’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Techno-Economic Paradigms
Essays in Honour of Carlota Perez
, pp. 171 - 188
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2009

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