Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Creative Accumulation explores how nations build capabilities for sustained technological leadership beyond simple catch-up growth. Drawing on Korea's long-term development experience, the book introduces the middle innovation trap—a condition in which nations achieve high implementation capability yet struggle to generate original concepts, architectures, and design leadership. Rejecting views of innovation as individual genius or sudden breakthrough, the book conceptualizes it as a cumulative process shaped by the gradual accumulation of skills, organizational routines, experimental learning, and institutional arrangements. Integrating innovation theory, evolutionary economics, and industrial policy, it explains how trial and error, recombination, and scale-up drive long-term technological trajectories.</jats:p> <jats:p>A central contribution is the sequential framework of development traps. Nations failing to build strong implementation capability fall into the middle income trap. Even after escaping it, they may encounter the middle innovation trap if concept design capability remains underdeveloped. Korea offers a distinctive case of overcoming the middle income trap while simultaneously experiencing stagnation associated with the middle innovation trap. This transition from implementation to concept design capability requires a fundamentally different innovation paradigm and sustained, coordinated national efforts.</jats:p> <jats:p>By identifying the middle innovation trap as a distinct stage of stagnation linked to capability transition, Creative Accumulation offers a new theoretical perspective on long-term development. It also delivers policy-relevant insights for both developing and advanced economies confronting structural transformation, technological disruption, and innovation-led growth in the twenty-first century.</jats:p>