“Sustainable prosperity” denotes an economy that generates stable and equitable growth for a large and growing middle class. From the 1940s into the 1970s, the United States appeared to be on a trajectory of sustainable prosperity, especially for white-male members of the U.S. labor force....

Once recognized as a high-performing newly industrializing economy, Thailand is currently in the middle-income trap. The country has remained at the middle-income level for more than 15 years. A major reason for such development is a relatively low technological learning of firms in Thailand....

Digital transformation is not only a field for the engineering sciences alone. Instead, this issue should be understand in all its facets. This, in particular with regard to human resources and political area.Beside this, the digital transformation has an important geopolitical dimension. China,...

This paper introduces the evolving understanding and conceptualization of innovation process models. We categorize the different approaches to understand and model innovation processes into two types. First, the so-called innovation management approach focuses on the evolution of corporate...

Over the last century and a half, global technological leadership has shifted from Great Britain to the United States. In this paper we argue that China is positioning itself to assume global leadership in technology within the coming few decades. We identify three sources of competitive...

Autonomous systems have been a key segment of disruptive technologies for which data are constantly collected, processed, and shared to enable their operations. The internet of things facilitates the storage and transmission of data and data sharing is vital to power their development. However,...

This is the first chapter in Part 3. Its purpose is to contrast the value structure of platform systems with step processes from a technological perspective. I first review the basic technical architecture of computers and argue that every computer is inherently a platform for performing...

The IBM PC was the first digital computer platform that was open by as a matter of strategy, not necessity. The purpose of this chapter is to understand the IBM PC as a technical system and set of organization choices in light of the theory of how technology shapes organizations. In Chapter 7, I...

In Chapter 2 we saw that the most economical locations for transactions in a task network are the so-called thin crossing points—places where transfers are easy to define, count and pay for. However, in many places in the task network, transfers of material, energy, and information are so...

Functional analysis as set forth in the last chapter decomposes a technical system into functional components that do things to advance the system’s purpose and the goals of its designers. Functional analysis in turn can be used to construct value structure maps of technical systems. Such maps...