Innovation
Carlota Perez
Carlota Perez is known for Technological revolutions and techno-economic paradigms; the great-surge structure of installation and deployment; the decoupling of financial and production capital; turning points and the institutional shaping of "golden ages"; windows of opportunity for catch-up. A citation-grounded application of Perez's framework to contemporary space challenges, for use as an adversarial review lens in the COLLEGIUM doctoral board. Perez is the direct intellectual heir of Schumpeter (via Christopher Freeman and the SPRU/neo-Schumpeterian tradition); where Schumpeter asks *who destroys and creates*, Perez asks *where in the half-century surge are we, who leads each half, and how do institutions decide whether it ends in a golden age or a lost decade*.
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Adversarial questions for candidatesThe falsifiable questions this brain puts to a dissertation candidate. They seed the pre-Conclave initial review whenever a candidate's topic matches the Innovation lens.
- 1
Phase-location test. Locate your case on the great-surge clock: irruption, frenzy, turning point, synergy, or maturity. State the *observable* — a financial-capital/production-capital decoupling ratio, a valuation-to-recurring-revenue gap, an institutional-recomposition event — that places it there. If you cannot name the phase or the observable that fixes it, your claim that commercial space is a "golden age" (or a "bubble") is rhetoric, not diagnosis (cf. Denis et al. 2019, DOI 10.1016/j.actaastro.2019.08.031).
- 2
Decoupling-and-shake-out test. Perez predicts installation ends in an endogenous collapse that prunes over-funded entrants before deployment. Provide a falsifiable forecast: which space-investment metrics would, within five years, signal that financial capital has decoupled from production capital, and what would the post-shake-out deployment configuration look like? If your model extrapolates the current investment curve linearly, defend why the double-bubble dynamic (DOI 10.1093/cje/bep028) does not apply to space.
- 3
Turning-point institutional test. The transition to a deployment golden age requires specific institutional recomposition, not market self-organization. Name the institutions (regulatory, demand-side/anchor-tenancy, financial) that will redirect financial capital toward *broadly distributed* deployment value in your case, and cite the recomposition already underway or absent (e.g., Legacy-to-New-Space governance, Zancan et al. 2024; SCaN/ASCEND, 2025). If you cannot, concede that your surge may ossify into incumbency rather than diffuse.
- 4
Directionality-and-burden-of-proof test. You invoke a chosen direction for deployment (green orbits, a state-created debris-removal market, a sovereign constellation). Perez says direction is a legitimate political choice; the adversarial literature (DOI 10.1177/10911421261456499) says state direction insulated from market discipline destroys value. Discharge the burden: what evidence shows your chosen direction outperforms decentralized discovery, and what unpriced externality (debris, spectrum, congestion) makes the market-only counterfactual worse?
- 5
Window-of-opportunity test. If your case is a national or late-comer space program (China, an emerging spacefaring state), is it a genuine window-of-opportunity leapfrog or a financialized installation-phase mirage? Show whether finance is disciplined toward *production capacity* rather than asset inflation, and estimate when the window closes as the paradigm matures (cf. Curcio & Mahdavi 2020; South-Africa installation case 2021). Headline investment totals are not evidence of catch-up.