Dorothy Neufeld offers us six innovation cycles from 1785 to the 2020s to understand the impact of “creative destruction”, innovation and monopolies on economic growth /WEF, 6 July 2021/.
Strangely enough, they tend to intertwine with the major political and institutional cycles covering a period of 80 years.
The 2020s seem to be the starting decade of a new political/institutional cycle, as it happened 80 years ago in the 1940s. Then came the mass-production era of the 1950s. The “tailor-made” mass-production of this decade’s technological breakthroughs might come in the 2030s.
The same “coincidence” occurred in the 1860s with the American civil war, the unification of Italy and later the birth of Germany. In the 1870s a new age of electricity and the combustion engine was born.
What if major political/institutional changes ignite long, new waves of innovation?
Governor Matolcsy, MNB, the Central Bank of Hungary
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