TY  - GEN
AB  - Technological know-how is necessary to make effectively use of new machinery
and capital goods. Firms and employees accumulate technology-specific
knowledge when working with specific machinery. Radical innovation differs
by technology type and pre-existing knowledge may be imperfectly transferable
across types. In this paper, I address the implications of cross-technology
transferability of skills for firm-level technology adoption and its consequences
for the direction of macroeconomic technological change. I propose a microeconomically
founded model of technological learning that is based on
empirical and theoretical insights of the innovation literature. In a simulation
study using the macroeconomic ABM Eurace@unibi-eco and applied to the
context of green technology diffusion, it is shown that a high transferability of
knowledge has ambiguous effects. It accelerates the diffusion process initially,
but comes of the cost of technological stability and specialization in the
long run. For firms, it is easy to adopt, but also easy to switch back to
the conventional technology type. It is shown how different types of policies
can be used to stabilize a technological transition pathway. The findings are
summarized in a general taxonomic framework to characterize technologies.
It represents a bottom-up approach to the study of technology transitions.
DA  - 2019
DO  - 10.4119/unibi/2936212
KW  - Technological transition
KW  - technology diffusion
KW  - technological knowledge
KW  - learning
KW  - climate policy
KW  - absorptive capacity
KW  - agent-based model
LA  - eng
PY  - 2019
SN  - 2196-2723
SP  - 82-
TI  - Skill transferability and the stability of transition pathways. A learning-based explanation for patterns of diffusion
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-29362123
Y2  - 2024-11-22T11:55:11
ER  -