Working Paper Abstract
Carrier Reproduction and the Transmission of Technological Innovation
Abstract
Technological innovations often spread faster than the capacity to reproduce them locally. A hospital may perform robotic procedures, a factory may run CNC equipment, or a firm may deploy AI tools while failing to renew the people who can operate, diagnose, repair, teach, and adapt the underlying capability. This paper develops a framework centered on carrier reproduction.
An individual carrier is a person with independent command of a technological task who can help reproduce that command in others. Organizations and ecosystems are carrier-bearing systems when they renew the required mix of such individuals over time. The framework distinguishes structural transmission, or the match between a design’s reproduction requirements, local social transmission fabric, and the available carrier base, from reproductive transmission, the process by which local operation renews carriers. Reproductive decoupling occurs when adoption or output continues while carrier reproduction weakens. Productive decoupling is the self-concealing case in which real output masks that weakening. The paper specifies diagnostic indicators, falsification conditions, validation designs, and illustrative settings including robotic surgery and AI-assisted knowledge work.
Keywords: carrier reproduction, technological diffusion, local institutions, learning-by-doing, absorptive capacity, AI