Sociologists and economists study the role of demand and consumption in the innovative process in this work. It contains a broad conceptual overview of the ways that sociological and economics literatures address issues of innovation, demand and consumption and offers different approaches to the economics of demand and innovation through an evolutionary framework, before reviewing how consumption fits. into evolutionary models of economic development The book includes a number of illuminating case studies, including an analysis of how black Americans use consumption to express collective identity, and a number of demand-innovation relationships within matrices or chains of producers and users or other actors, including service industries such as security, and the environmental performance of companies.