Technological progress, innovation and financial behavior.

Summary Technological progress has moved from a macro-economic analysis where growth depended on the appearance of a new technology, which, because of its extension over several sectors of activity, was generally encouraged and financed by governments, to a more micro-economic analysis where innovation is a strategic necessity for the company to ensure its competitiveness. The determinants of technological investment are changing as the world of science and technology is in a state of constant flux. This evolution transforms the structure of the real markets and modifies the financial sphere by the appearance of new financial needs which provoke the birth of a multitude of financial products. Thus, at the end of the 1970s, we moved from a linear model of innovation financing to a model based on financing through increased intervention of capital markets, better adapted to the financing of risk projects. This evolution led to a double trend during the 1980s: the liberalization of financial systems and the globalization of real economies due to the increase in fixed R&D costs and the need to reach critical size. Considering these two trends, the model of innovation financing should be homogeneous on a global scale and technological specialization should disappear. However, the analysis of historical facts has shown that national and sectoral specificities remain: innovation in SMEs has remained the business of the national component of the financial system, characterized by an uneven development of new markets; government intervention for the financing of innovation has continued in most countries to different degrees. Thus, the two models of financing technical progress coexisted at the end of the 1980s in most countries, with the persistence of the classic dominance of national innovation systems and financial systems.