This is a period that has been singled out as particularly interesting both by historians of technology and by military historians.

In particular, we present an historical study of the evolution of tanks for the period 1915–1945. The main aim of this paper is to re-visit the original potentialities of Dosi’s framework in a detailed case-study of the evolution of a specific technology. Besides these authors, however, most of the literature has adopted the notions of paradigms and trajectories in a rather loose way, mainly as metaphors featuring in broad (‘appreciative’) reconstructions of the patterns of technological evolution.

Footnote 1 Since the seminal contributions by Dosi ( 1982, 1988), Footnote 2 several authors have devoted substantial efforts to provide detailed empirical analyses of the process of technical change employing this framework (see, amongst others, Sahal 1985 and Saviotti 1996). The notions of technological paradigms and technological trajectories have exerted a wide appeal among economists and other social scientists working in the field of innovation studies.

Tank - force of nature download