News

Obituary Professor Emeritus Stan Metcalfe (*March 20, 1946 - †March 14, 2025)

On March 14, our dear colleague and friend Stan Metcalfe passed away. An outstanding researcher and great personality has left us – his pathbreaking insights into restless capitalism will prevail. We are deeply saddened and would like to express our heartfelt condolences to Stan's family.

Stan Metcalfe was the Stanley Jevons Professor of Political Economy (Emeritus) at the University of Manchester and held an honorary position in the Alliance Manchester Business School. Before that held academic appointments at the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester as well as numerous visiting positions all over the world. In 2018 he has made an Honorary Doctor of the University of Gothenburg Business School. He served in numerous positions related to public policy in the UK, including membership of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and the Advisory Committee on Science and Technology.

Among others Stan was the past President of the International J.A. Schumpeter Society. He invited Schumpeter scholars from all over the world to Manchester in 2000, the Schumpeter Millennium Conference, a marvellous event, we all recall at the site of the first industrial revolution. His passion for the first industrial revolution went as far as reconstructing a steam engine with his own hands, whose ingenuity he admired.

Stan has written extensively in the fields of international economics, macroeconomics and, more recently, the economic study of innovation and its sources and consequences. In this later field he has published many research papers as well as the book Evolutionary Economics and Creative Destruction. His curiosity was also directed towards the more empirical aspects of innovation studies. Among the many subjects he explored were at least two: the place and role of universities and research in a knowledge economy, and the very particular dynamics of innovation in health. In any case, his thoughts were rooted in a deep knowledge of the great economists who spoke in his ear: Schumpeter, but also Marshall, Marx, Polanyi, Harrod, Kaldor, Hayek, Shackle and many others.

Economic dynamics in heterogeneous economic structures and outside equilibrium was “his” research interest at least since the end of the 1980ies. After an initial study on the diffusion of innovation in the Lancashire textile industry in 1970, his primary interest in the 1970s was in foreign trade theory. His interest in innovation and technological change returned in the mid-1980s. He contributed reflections on the mechanisms of development, the dynamics of competition and the role of technological diversity in these processes, as well as in-depth technological studies on automatic transmission systems, electronic summation metering and installation equipment: fuses for semiconductor devices. The broad concept of selective competition combined with innovative activities he saw at the core of the dynamics of capitalism – restlessly new ideas, combinations and business models are brought up that in selective competition strive for legitimacy and returns. Hence, economic evolution is just made up by the complexity and mechanisms of newness and selection leading to a process of creative destruction – and this in rather restless way. Such insights and concepts, so much shaped and convincingly disseminated by Stan, will survive and be the basis for further developments, refinements, and presumably considerable rewriting whenever necessary.

Beyond his academic contributions, Stan was always enthusiast and supportive with junior colleagues and curious about new ideas and open to suggestions, discussions and debates. Our community has lost a great contributor to the progress of our understanding of complex and ‘restless’ societies.

Strasbourg and Jena, March 19, 2025

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Obituary Richard Nelson (4th May1930 – 28th January 2025)

It is with great sadness that we have to inform you that Richard R. (Dick) Nelson has left us. He passed away peacefully on 28th January 2025. A long and fulfilling life has come to an end, a life characterized by the highest level of scientific achievement, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, and a broad-based desire for knowledge. Dick has launched a scientific life's work that is unrivalled. Together with Sid Winter and others, he put the concept of evolutionary economics on a solid footing and thus set in motion an intellectual movement and school of thought that deals with economic phenomena from a dynamic and disequilibrium-orientated perspective.

Of course, Dick’s contribution to the discipline is crucial and moreover it is a contribution which since half a century has not yet demonstrated its full impact. But he had an incredible ability to educate (and not only to train) students and young researchers. Dick had this rare ability to mobilize attention and energy towards the most precise and relevant intellectual challenges, not only as a mentor but also and mainly through a deep and intense collaboration. And, almost independently from his contributions to the discipline through publications, his most long-lasting impact is and will be in the long term his influence on the personal intellectual trajectory of many of our colleagues.

Dick Nelson is not only an extra-ordinary teacher, he is also an efficient and remarkable “adviser’. From his participation in the RAND corporation to his more recent collaboration with OECD, we have to remember that he served on the Council of Economic Advisors of the President of the United States, a mythical place for economists, during a mythical period, the 60s. He was also head of an influential program on Science, Technology, and Global Development, at the Columbia Earth Institute, and Professor of International and Public Affairs, Business, and Law, at Columbia University.

Dick joined the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society at a very early stage and took part in the 1988 conference in Siena for the first time. His ideas and concepts subsequently influenced the development of the Society. This also earned him the honorary presidency of the Schumpeter Society. With his oeuvre, Dick has influenced generations of scientists, accompanied and advised them and was always a great friend to them, with touching warmth and kindness.

We will miss Dick Nelson as a person as much as we will miss him as an intellectual pioneer, source of ideas and advisor. Our world has become a much poorer place. Our deepest sympathy goes to his bereaved family.

In deep mourning

Patrick Llerena (President ISS) and Uwe Cantner (Secretary General ISS)