The story of flight

ABSTRACT

The history of commercial aviation - from the earliest attempts at flight to the modern civil aircraft - is used to illustrate the central role of the evolutionary progress of collective knowledge in what is loosely described as technical progress. No individual knows how to build an airbus - ten thousand people working together do. The emphasis on collective intelligence as a means of solving problems builds on Penrose’s insight that the firm is best viewed a s a collection of capabilities to develop a template for the modern corporation that recognises the development of ‘capital as a service’ and the importance of ‘hollow corporations’, franchises and platforms in the twenty-first century economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Hollow Corporations
• Collective Intellgenice
• Capitalism
• History
• Aviation

JEL CLASSIFICATION::

• D7
• D21
• L2
• L5
• L62
• L93

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Galton (1907); Surowiecki (2005).

2. Regis (2020).

3. Jensen and Meckling (1976); Williamson (1975); Grossman and Hart (1986).

4. Penrose (1995) p. 2.

5. The pilot communicates all instructions to an electronic console, eliminating the mechanical interface familiar to car drivers and Boeing pilots on planes before the 777.

6. (4 Apr. Burrows 2013).

7. Norges Bank Investment Management (13 Jan. 2011).

8. Apple (2019) p. 31.

9. Amazon (2020) p. 40.

10. (20 Oct. Rosoff 2016).

11. Compass Group (2019), 15; G4S (2019), 2; ISS (2019) p. 8.

12. IBM (2019) p. 64.

13. (3 Mar. Jonas 1986).

14. Jonas (1986)

15. Davis (2016).

16. Uber (6 Feb. 2020) p. 7.

17. Ansoff (1965), 2–3.

18. American Economic Association (1983).

19. Bain (1959) pp. vii – viii.

20. Porter (1979).

21. (9 Dec. Coase 1991).

22. Williamson (1975).

23. (23 Sept. Mikkelson 2007).

24. McCraw (2007)

25. Milgrom and Roberts (1992)

26. Tirole(1988)

27. Prahalad and Hamel(1990)

28. Henrich (2015)

29. Foss (2002) p. 161.

30. Hayes (2018)