- published: 10 Jun 2014
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Technocapitalism (a portmanteau word combining "technology" and "capitalism," two of the most commonly used words in the social sciences) is a term used to describe the changes in capitalism brought about by the emergence of high technology sectors in the economy.
Luis Suarez-Villa, in his 2009 book Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism argues that it is a new version of capitalism that generates new forms of corporate organization designed to exploit intangibles such as creativity and new knowledge. The new organizations, which he refers to as experimentalist organizations are deeply grounded in technological research, as opposed to manufacturing and services production, and in the appropriation of research outcomes as intellectual property.
Under technocapitalism, creativity and new knowledge become the most valuable resources, much as raw materials and factory labor were under industrial capitalism. His book argues that new technology sectors such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and its many fields, such as synthetic bioengineering, bioinformatics, biopharmacology, and agro-biotech, the emerging new field of biomimetics and its transformation of robotics, and the introduction of molecular processors in computing and communications, among various new sectors and technologies, will become symbolic of the 21st century, in much the same way that aviation and mass production were of the 20th century.