The articles in this issue of Business History Review examine a core issue of the journal, innovation, and the efforts by both private firms and governments to create environments for enduring performance. In “Sustainability and Shared Value in the Interwar Swedish Copper Industry,” Ann-Kristin Bergquist and Magnus Lindmark analyze the role of business in searching for an environmentally friendly, and still profitable, method of production. Similarly, in his article “Innovation's Golden Triangle,” Paul Miranti describes Bell's efforts to create an organizational system that would recognize lasting synergies in the evolving areas of finance, regulation, and science.
In their study of the radio industry during the Great Depression (“Bringing Radio into America's Homes”) Peter Scott and James T. Walker describe the ways that manufacturing companies formed relationships with distributors and retailers to create powerful systems that succeeded, at least for a while, in distributing new technology to users. Finally Susana Martínez-Rodríquez, in her article “The Use of Legal Flexibility in Spanish Company Law, 1869–1953,” relates the various ways that Spanish firms organized themselves, showing a range of company structures unusual in a civil law country.
In addition, this issue contains an analysis of the investment strategy of eminent economist John Maynard Keynes in the years following the 1929 stock market crash. In “Keynes and Wall Street,” David Chambers and Ali Kabiri describe the economist's interest in company fundamentals and value investing—in this area, as in others, Keynes was ahead of the curve.
