Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to bring forth an interaction between evolutionary economics and industrial systematics. The suggested solution is to reconstruct the "family tree" of the industries. Such a tree is based on similarities, but it may also reflect the evolutionary history in industries and their knowledge bases. The paper is inspired by molecular biology, where phylogenies of biological life are reconstructed by means of extremely rich genomic data and powerful computer algorithms. The paper suggests that input-output data can be used as a first source of reconstructing industrial systematics. For this purpose the paper shows how matrices of input-output coefficients can be transformed into binary characteristics matrices and to distance matrices, and it also discusses the possible evolutionary meaning of this translation. Then these derived matrices are used as inputs to algorithms for the heuristic finding of optimal industrial trees. The results are presented as taxonomic trees that can easily be compared with the hierarchical structure of existing systems of industrial classification.
| Original language | English |
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| Pages | 36 |
| Publication status | Published - 2002 |