Perez Technological Surge Cycle

Carlota Perez’s framework for how successive technological revolutions unfold, captured by Kyle from an inbox image. In the corpus it supplies the long-wave frame for Technological Innovation: techno-economic paradigms move through an installation phase — frenzy, bubble, and crash — into a deployment phase, the “golden age.” On the Technological Innovation page this surge cycle sits alongside Bilal Zuberi’s deep-tech “time to build” argument as the structural backdrop for whether real-world progress gets gated or unblocked.

Context: Carlota Perez, a Venezuelan-British scholar, laid out this model in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (2002). Each great surge (the Industrial Revolution, steam/railways, steel/electricity, oil/autos/mass production, and information/telecom) passes through installation — when financial capital drives speculative over-investment, ending in a crash — and deployment, when production capital spreads the technology’s benefits across the economy. A turning point of institutional recomposition separates the two halves.

Where this appears

• Technological Innovation — the surge cycle as the long-wave frame (installation/bubble → deployment/golden age) for how paradigms unfold.
• Carlota Perez — the scholar behind the framework; author of Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital.