The silence that greeted Adam McHugh's request for definitions of technology  
was in sharp contrast to the flurry of replies that usually greet a request  
posted here and is possibly indicative of the lack of concern among many  
economists with the details of technology and technological change,  
resulting in a paucity of precise definitions.  
  
Most students of economics are taught little about the details of technology  
and hence of the details of how technological change impacts on the economy.  
  
Many growth theorists model technology as hidden in the black box of an  
aggregate neoclassical production function, whether they model technological  
change as exogenous, as did Solow, or endogenous, as did Romer. Nathan  
Rosenberg has broken open that black box in several publications, such as  
"Inside and Black Box" and "Exploring the Black Box". But his work has had  
little impact on most growth theorists who continue to model technology as  
"flat" whose nature is captured by the form of the aggregate production  
function and whose changes are modelled by shifts in a parameter "A" in  
production functions such as Y = Af(Labour, Physical Capital, Human  
Capital). Little attention is usually paid to defining technology in such  
cases but the implicit definition is "that which determines the form of the  
aggregate production function, and changes in which alter the parameter A,   
or  
the efficiency units in which in the inputs are measured".  
  
In our forthcoming book "Economic Transformations: General Purpose  
Technologies and Long Term Economic Growth" (Lipsey, Carlaw and Bekar, OUP  
November 2005), we consider various definitions of technology and then  
define it as follows (page 58-9)  
  
"Definition: Technological knowledge, technology for short, is the set of  
ideas specifying all activities that create economic value. It comprises:  
(1) knowledge about product technologies, the specifications of everything  
that is produced; (2) knowledge about process technologies, the  
specifications of all processes by which goods and services are produced;  
(3) knowledge about organisational technologies, the specification of how  
productive activity is organized in productive and administrative units for  
producing present and future goods and services (which thus includes  
knowledge about how to conduct R&D)."  
  
"This definition distinguishes technological knowledge from other types of  
knowledge, including scientific knowledge. As with all definitions, there  
are grey areas at the boundaries. In particular, some things are excluded  
that come close to being what we might think of as technological knowledge.  
For example, knowledge about some physical process is scientific knowledge  
until it is put to use to make something of economic value. When that is  
done, the knowledge that does the job becomes technological knowledge. So,  
for example, Newton's laws of motion are scientific knowledge but when they  
were used to make a better water wheel, the knowledge of how to do so is  
technological. We might say that it embodies or uses the scientific  
knowledge that is Newton's laws, but the specification of how to make the  
wheel is technological."  
  
            "Although all capital goods embody technological knowledge, they  
are not themselves technology. Although it is humans who know how to  
construct and operate the things that create economic  
value, the embodiment of this knowledge in their memory circuits is not  
technology. Although technology is embodied in both physical and human  
capital, it is distinct from both."  
  
  
This broad definition is intended to define technology in a way that is  
suitable to studying the details of technological change as the prime engine  
of long term economic growth and modelling it in a structured (non-flat)  
manner.  
  
  
Richard G. Lipsey