This volume is devoted to innovation with a special focus on its two sides, namely creation and destruction, and on its role in the evolution of capitalist economies. The first part of the book looks at innovation and its effects on economic performance, addressing issues of motives, behavioral rules under uncertainty, actor properties, and technology characteristics. The second part concentrates on potential consequences of innovative activities, in particular structural change, the "innovation-mediated" effect of skill-oriented policies on regional performance, the destructive effects of innovation activities, and the question whether novelty is always good. The role of innovation in the evolution of capitalism itself is discussed in the third part.

This volume is devoted to innovation with a special focus on its two sides, namely creation and destruction, and on its role in the evolution of capitalist economies. The first part of the book looks at innovation and its effects on economic performance, addressing issues of motives, behavioral rules under uncertainty, actor properties, and technology characteristics. The second part concentrates on potential consequences of innovative activities, in particular structural change, the "innovation-mediated" effect of skill-oriented policies on regional performance, the destructive effects of innovation activities, and the question whether novelty is always good. The role of innovation in the evolution of capitalism itself is discussed in the third part.

Usually, the first edition of a book still contains a multiplicity of typographic, con ceptional, and computational errors even if one believes the opposite at the time of publication. As this book did not represent a counterexample to this rule, the current second edition offers a chance to remove at least the known shortcomings. The book has been partly re-organized. The previously rather long Chapter 4 has been split into two separate chapters dealing with discrete-time and continuous time approaches to nonlinear economic dynamics. The short summary of basic properties of linear dynamical systems has been banned to an appendix because the line of thought in the chapter seems to have been unnecessarily interrupted by these technical details and because the book concentrates on nonlinear systems. This appendix, which mainly deals with special formal properties of dynamical sys tems, also contains some new material on invariant subspaces and center-manifold reductions. A brief introduction into the theory of lags and operators is followed by a few remarks on the relation between the 'true' properties of dynamical systems and their behavior observable in numerical experiments. Additional changes in the main part of the book include a re-consideration of Popper's determinism vs. inde terminism discussion in the light of chaotic properties of deterministic, nonlinear systems in Chapter 1. An investigation of a simultaneous price-quantity adjustment process, a more detailed inquiry into the uniqueness property of limit cycles, and a short presentation of relaxation oscillations are included in Chapter 2.

"Is the business cycle obsolete?" This often cited title of a book edited by Bronfenbren ner with the implicit affirmation of the question reflected the attitude of mainstream macroeconomics in the 1960s regarding the empirical relevance of cyclic motions of an economy. The successful income policies, theoretically grounded in Keynesian macroec onomics, seemed to have eased or even abolished the fluctuations in Western economies which motivated studies of many classical and neoclassical economists for more than 100 years. The reasoning behind the conviction that business cycles would increasingly be come irrelevant was rather simple: if an economy fluctuates for whatever reason, then it is almost always possible to neutralize these cyclic motions by means of anticyclic demand policies. From the 1950s until the mid-1960s business cycle theory had often been consid ered either as an appendix to growth theory or as an academic exercise in dynamical economics. The common business cycle models were essentially multiplier-accelerator models whose dependence on particular parameter values (in order to exhibit oscillatory motion) suggested a rather improbable occurrence of persistent fluctuations. The obvi ous success in compensating business cycles in those days prevented intensive concern with the occurrence of cycles. Rather, business cycle theory turned into stabilization theory which investigated theoretical possibilities of stabilizing a fluctuating economy. Many macroeconomic textbooks appeared in the 1960s which consequently identified business cycle theory with inquiries on the possibilities to stabilize economies by means of active fiscal or monetary policies."

This volume contains the proceedings of the 1997 International Symposium on Operations Research (SOR' 97) held at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, Sep tember 3-5, 1997. The symposium was organized under the auspices of the two German societies on Operations Research, namely the Deutsche Gesellschajt fur Operations Research (DGOR) and the Gesellschajt fur Mathematik, Okonomie und Operations Research (GMOOR). During their annual business meetings, the DGOR and GMOOR members unanimously decided that their societies should be assimi lated by the newly founded Gesellschajt fur Operations Research (GOR). The SOR' 97 meeting was attended by 521 participants from 31 countries. The presentation of 360 papers was organized in 16 sections, each of which also saw semiplenary lectures by prominent invited speakers. Plenary lectures by J.K. Lenstra and P. Mertens as well as a panel discussion on the role of new communication media represented major academic events of the symposium. 131 papers were submitted for publication in the present volume. The space limitation and the advice of the section chairpersons only allowed for the inclusion of 85 contributed papers in the proceedings. Additionally, written versions of seven semiplenary lectures could be included in the volume. The abstracts of all 360 papers presented at the symposium can be obtained in electronic form from the WWW at http: //www.wiwLuni-jena.de/sor97.html."