It reflects a modern concern to establish a more systematic understanding of the process of creative destruction

Conclusion
29This has been a brief exploratory essay on the evolutionary, adaptive, transformative nature of economic growth, reinforcing what we consider, along with Abramovitz, to be two of the most important of the stylised facts, namely, diversity of growth and retardation of growth. From them follow structural change and the need for the continual development of new industries, new impulses, if aggregate growth at a more or less constant rate is to be sustained. The ecological distinctions between carrying capacity and intrinsic rates of increase have helped to clarify the nature of the impulse to growth and the way in which this potential is exhausted. In this account, the central contribution of technical progress is to create new impulses, which are capitalised upon by the central economic mechanisms of consumer and producer learning, investment in capacity expansion and post innovation improvements in technology. As the economy grows more complex, the scope for creating new impulses will surely increase but how this works is another story.
30Of course, much has been left unsaid. The whole analysis has a flavour of partial evolution about it and one naturally wishes to know how different industries would interact to reinforce or limit one another’s growth. [17][17]Cf. Metcalfe, Foster and Ramlogan, 2002, for some development… Similarly the firm has been subsumed in the industry and again this connection needs to be unpacked with a proper appreciation of the competitive process between firms. [18][18]Cf. Metcalfe (1998). Much remains to be done. Most fundamentally of all, to follow this line of enquiry further requires far more attention to be given to the experimental dimensions of a capitalist market economy. The conditions under which new business conjectures are generated and translated into innovations must be at the centre of this story, as must the vital property of market institutions that they encourage and facilitate challenges to established economic positions. This really is a story of restless capitalism and it is to the great credit of Kuznets, Burns and their followers that they were able to develop a framework for endogenous growth that begins from these essential features of modern capitalism. To answer these questions is exactly the challenge set down by Nelson and Winter, towards the resolution of which this paper has tried to contribute.