Sad news this week about the death of Chris Freeman, an outstanding economist who created and led the Science & Technology Policy Research Unit at Sussex. He was one of the surprisingly few economists to focus intensely on the relation between technology and the wider economy, looking at the institutions and processes through which invention becomes innovation, investment and growth – or rather, he got there early. The rest of the profession has caught up by now. The memorial page has links to several obituaries.

His best-known book is probably The Economics of Industrial Innovation (co-authored with Luc Soete). My favourite is As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolution to the Information Revolution (written with Francisco Louca). It puts successive technological innovations in historical perspective, and did so at a time when many big-name macroeconomists were still sceptical about the impact of information and communications technologies. The industrial economists and economic historians (like Nick Crafts and Brad DeLong) were the first onto the significance of ICTs. Anyway, Freeman's book is still a great read if the grand sweep of history combined with organisational insight  is your cup of tea.