Nicholas Kaldor. Faits stylisés, progrès technique et croissance cumulative

While Nicholas Kaldor is not an innovation theorist per se, his work on economic growth is no less notable for the study of innovation, both theoretically and methodologically. Thus, Kaldor is one of the first to leave an increasing place to facts, history and an inductive approach, a methodological approach that has since been widely adopted in work on innovation. From a theoretical point of view, with the introduction of its "technical progress function" at the end of the 1950s and the development of its "cumulative growth" theory from the second half of the 1960s, Kaldor proposes an approach where technical change, beyond just innovations, is no longer an exogenous factor and where growth is self-sustaining. Kaldor's work sheds light on the mechanisms that will be at the heart of the theory of endogenous growth, but almost a quarter of a century before the advent of the latter.