… is from page 20 of Nathan Rosenberg’s and L.E. Birdzell, Jr.’s superb 1986 book, How the West Grew Rich:
The immediate sources of Western growth were innovations in trade, technology, and organization, in combination with accumulation of more and more capital, labor, and applied natural resources. Innovations emerged as a significant factor in Western growth as early as the mid-fifteenth century, and from the mid-eighteenth century on it has been pervasive and dominant. Innovation occurred in trading, production, products, services, institutions, and organization. The main characteristics of innovation – uncertainty, search, exploration, financial risk, experiment, and discovery – have so permeated the West’s expansion of trade and the West’s development of natural resources as to make it virtually an additional factor of production.
