Aging - Knowledge Accumulation – Capital Accumulation Technical and social innovations in aging societies Hardy Hanappi University of Technology Vienna, Economics Argentinierstrasse 8, A-1040 Vienna Austria Tel +431 58801 17555, Fax +431 58801 17599 Hanappi@econ.tuwien.ac.at Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger University of Economics of Vienna, Research Group Gender & Diversity Augasse 21/7, A-1090 Vienna Austria Edeltraud.Hanappi-Egger@wu-wien.ac.at Paper submitted to the 11th ISS Conference on ‘Innovation, competition and growth: Schumpeterian perspectives’ in Sophia-Antipolis (France), 22-24 June 2006. Abstract This paper investigates how innovations are influencing the development of societies that are characterized by the demographic trend of an aging population. The study of such a setting seems to become particularly important for the European Union, which currently faces a rather dramatic acceleration in the aging process of its population. While such a trend clearly has severe consequences on re-regulation, e.g. education-pension systems and immigration rules, its interplay with innovations has not yet been sufficiently studied. The paper therefore will try to provide an overview of a new combination of different strands of economic research: • Demo-economic modelling using an overlapping generations model, • Epistemological research on the meaning of knowledge accumulation, • Empirically oriented research on the embedded ness of technical innovations in capital accumulation, • Research on the political economy of social innovations, e.g. institution building. In other words, a new combination (in Schumpeter’s sense) is proposed to be tested as possible scientific innovation. Introduction – The Need for a Synthesis Since the end of World War 2 economic theory building was characterized by an accelerating development of specialization, division into sub-disciplines and formalisations tailored to the needs of the respective field of inquiry. Additionally some more advanced formal