Janello Torriani, known in the Spanish-speaking world as Juanelo Turriano (Cremona, Italy ca. 1500 - Toledo, Spain 1585), is the greatest among Renaissance inventors and constructors of machines. Contemporary literates and mathematicians celebrated Janello Torriani and his creations in their writings. It is striking how such fame turned into nearly complete oblivion, leaving only a few clues of a blurred and distorted memory dispersed here and there. This book wishes to show the central role that artisans formed in the Vitruvian tradition played in demonstrating through practical mathematics an increasing and positive control over Nature, a step rooted in humanist culture and foundational for the understanding of those historical processes known as the Scientific and the Industrial Revolutions.

This major textbook provides a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the economics of innovation, written for students with some basic knowledge of economics. G.M. Peter Swann contends that innovation is one of the most important economic and business phenomena of our time and a topic of great practical and policy interest, with widespread implications for our economy and society. This book engages with the reader to explore some of the key economic issues concerning innovation. Bridging a gap in the literature, this timely textbook addresses critical questions such as: How should different aspects of innovation be described and classified? What are the incentives to innovate? How should firms organize themselves to promote innovation? What are the effects of innovation on the economy? Do governments have a role in supporting and guiding innovation? Introducing the student to a broad range of issues surrounding the economics of innovation, this text will prove invaluable to students on a variety of courses including economics, business and management, innovation, and science and technology studies.

The emergence of platforms is a novel phenomenon impacting most industries, from products to services. Industry platforms such as Microsoft Windows or Google, embedded within industrial ecosystems, have redesigned our industrial landscapes, upset the balance of power between firms, fostered innovation and raised new questions on competition and innovation. Annabelle Gawer presents cutting-edge contributions from 24 top international scholars from 19 universities across Europe, the USA and Asia, from the disciplines of strategy, economics, innovation, organization studies and knowledge management. The novel insights assembled in this volume constitute a fundamental step towards an empirically based, nuanced understanding of the nature of platforms and the implications they hold for the evolution of industrial innovation. The book provides an overview of platforms and discusses governance, management, design and knowledge issues. With a multidisciplinary approach, this book will strongly appeal to academics and advanced students in management, innovation, strategy, economics and design. It will also prove an enlightening read for business managers in IT industries.

"What might the futures of practice be like?" is far from a straightforward question. Emphasising "the" before the word future, implies one future. But futures thinkers have identified a range of futures that people think about. In this book we reflect on possible, probable, and preferable futures in relation to practice and work. Readers are invited to consider how their own engagement in shaping possible futures will support ways of working that they deem preferable, even those they can hardly imagine. Challenging Future Practice Possibilities also examines influences that are maintaining the status quo and others that are pushing interest-driven change. Authors consider the major challenges that practice and practitioners face today such as wicked problems, fears for the future and complex demands and opportunities posed by the digital revolution. A number of examples of future-oriented work directions such as protean careers and artificial intelligence enhancing or even replacing human workforces, are considered along with concerns like the vulnerability of many work situations and workers. In some cases workers and employers alike are unprepared for these challenges, while others see adapting to these situations as yet another pathway of practice futures evolution.