Much is said about the information age, the information economy, the information society, and particularly about information technology, but little about information itself. Here, Stuart Macdonald finds information central to a variety of business/economics disciplines, from patents to high technology, from corporate strategy to industrial espionage. In doing so, he reveals the rather tricky role that information plays in current processes of innovation and change.

• Introduction


• 1: The Nature of Information


• 2: Change and Innovation


• 3: Sources of Information for Change and Innovation


• 4: The Flow of Information


• 5: The Mixing of Information


• 6: Resistance to Information: The Organization and the Independent Inventor


• 7: Information Intrigue: Controlling the Flow of Information


• 8: Information Innocence: High-Technology Policy and Technology Parks


• 9: Transfer without Transaction: Policy for Information Acquisition


• 10: Hidden Information Flow: Innovation in Eighteenth-Century Agriculture


• 11: The Illusion of Order: Innovation and the Patent System


• 12: Information and Control: Strategic Change in the Organization


• Concluding Thoughts

Co-editor of the journal Prometheus (Carfax)
1977-87 Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, Department of Economics, University of Queensland