The articles in this issue of Business History Review emphasize the themes of innovation, globalization, and government policy. Catherine Casson and Mark Dodgson draw distinctions between proactive and reactive innovation in the histories of firms in several sectors in England between 1750 and 1860. In particular, Casson and Dodgson detail the ways in which product design became a site for advantageous innovation. Peter Scott's article offers a study of failures of innovation in the vacuum cleaner industry in the 1920s. He identifies a lack of diversity in core competencies as a key factor in the resistance to innovation that rendered these large companies less able to respond to rapidly changing conditions at the onset of the Great Depression. Jan-Otmar Hesse reexamines the history of the German textile industry in a globalizing market, offering a new framing of a common narrative about liberalization and the decline of the industry. Rather than a simple story of a declining “old industry,” Hesse finds that internationalization allowed German textile companies to offshore production, and still remain dominant in the industry for several decades by moving to a diversified production model. Christophe Lécuyer considers globalization in high tech manufacturing, describing Intel's efforts to overcome Japanese dominance in the sector in the 1970s, in part by adopting Japanese technological methods and operating procedures. Finally, Rolv Petter Amdam, Robert Fredona, and Sophus A. Reinert use the eighteenth-century history of the Christiania Glasmagasin to examine the sometimes surprising ways in which government, industry, and private investors worked out questions of public and private ownership in the early stages of Scandinavian industrialization.
A research note by Bernardita Escobar Andrae and Nelson Arellano Escudero describes their work to trace the development of wind, solar, tidal, and wave power technologies through the register of patent applications in Chile in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The issue is rounded out by Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato's review essay evaluating the contents of a two-volume collection of essays on Companies and Entrepreneurs in the History of Chile, which she describes as “an excellent point of departure to the understanding of Chile's business history over more than two centuries.”
