Competition and Entrepreneurship is a book with many interesting insights. Kirzner provides a thorough critique of contemporary price theory, theory of entrepreneurship, and the theory of competition. He sees orthodox price theory as explaining the configuration of prices and quantities that satisfied the conditions for equilibrium. He argues that "it is more useful to look to price theory to help understand how the decisions of individual participants in the market interact to generate the market forces which compel changes in prices, outputs, and methods of production and in the allocation of resources". Although Competition and Entrepreneurship is primarily concerned with the operation of the market economy, Kirzner clearly shows that the rediscovery of the entrepreneur must emerge as a step of major importance.

"Creative destruction," he said, is the driving force of capitalism. His vision was stark: Nearly all businesses fail, victims of innovation by their competitors. Businesspeople ignore this lesson at their peril - to survive, they must be entrepreneurial and think strategically. Yet in Schumpeter's view, the general prosperity produced by the "capitalist engine" far outweighs the wreckage it leaves behind. "Prophet of Innovation" is also the private story of a man rescued repeatedly by women who loved him and put his well-being above their own. Without them, he would likely have perished, so fierce were his conflicts between his reason and his emotions.

Richard Cantillon (1680-1734), an Irish economist, has claims to be regarded as one of the most outstanding analytical economists of the eighteenth century. F. A. Hayek wrote that Cantillon was the first to fully articulate economics as a science. In the Essay, Cantillon outlined an extraordinary model-building approach showing how the economy could be built up, through progressive stages, from a command, barter, closed economy to a market economy, which uses money and is open. He produced some outstanding monetary theory including what Mark Blaug called the Cantillon effect when demonstrating the effects of monetary expansion on inflation, output, and the balance of payments. He also highlighted the difficulties created by excessive financial innovation for a real economy and outlined the dangers of foreign borrowing by a country. Though written in the eighteenth century, the Essay has a considerable resonance for a twenty-first-century audience.

This book provides a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the economics of innovation. The aim of the book is to explore some of the key economic questions about innovation. How can we describe and classify different aspects of innovation? What are the incentives to innovate? How should companies organise themselves to promote innovation? What are the effects of innovation on the economy? Do governments have a role in supporting and guiding innovation?

The central focus of this book is on the role of what shall be called the firm´s strategic vision of where technologies and markets are going. The vision is the strategic plan of top management for the future technologies and future markets. Swann and Gill argue that this plays a central role in determining an organisation´s ability to adapt to the challenge of technology and market changes, not just because of its importance in R&D and investment strategy, but also because if a strategic vision is well implemented, technology change will not seem so disruptive as it can be implemented using existing organisational routines.