Creative destruction

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The Creative Destruction (also creative destruction , . English creative destruction ) is a term used in macroeconomics , whose core message is: Every economic development (in the sense of not merely quantitative development) builds on the process of creative destruction or creative on. A new combination of production factors , which successfully asserts itself, displaces old structures and ultimately destroys them. Destruction is therefore necessary - and not a system failure, for example - for reorganization to take place.

Concept history

Analogously, the term appears already in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and in the capital of Karl Marx on. It denotes that a new economic order is displacing an old one, just as capitalism has prevailed over the feudalist mode of production. Werner Sombart took up the term in this sense, but it became better known through the writings of Joseph Schumpeter . There it experienced a change insofar as it now stands for the positive economic properties of capitalist production, namely the ability to innovate and technical-economic progress. More recently, Clayton M. Christensen from Harvard Business School introduced the term disruptive technology or innovation, as a result of which fundamental (disruptive) market changes occur.

Economic importance according to Schumpeter

The concept of creative destruction is a basic motif of Schumpeter's work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy , first published in English in 1942. It is introduced in Chapter 7. There he writes:

“The opening of new, foreign or domestic markets and the organizational development from handicrafts and factories to corporations like US Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation - if I may use this biological expression - that incessantly changes the economic structure from within revolutionizes², incessantly destroying the old structure and incessantly creating a new one.

This process of “creative destruction” is the essential fact for capitalism. That is what capitalism consists of and that is what every capitalist entity must live in. "

"Note" These revolutions are not actually continuous; they occur in unsteady shocks that are separated from each other by tensioning relative calm. The process as a whole is, however, uninterrupted - in the sense that either revolution or absorption of the results of the revolution is always going on; the two together form what is known as the business cycle . "

The idea of ​​creative destruction already plays a role in Schumpeter's work Theory of Economic Development . The trigger for the creative destruction are innovations that are driven by the entrepreneurs with the aim of asserting themselves on the market .

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Clayton M. Christensen: The innovator's dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail . Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts (USA) 1997, ISBN 978-0-87584-585-2 .
  2. ^ Joseph A. Schumpeter: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy . UTB, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-8252-0172-4
  3. Joseph Schumpeter: Theory of Economic Development . Berlin 1912, p. 157 .