Richard R. Nelson (1930–2023) was a leading figure in the fields of innovation and evolutionary economics. He served as the George Blumenthal Professor at Columbia University and held prior roles at Oberlin College, Carnegie Mellon University, and Yale University.

He served as research economist and analyst at the Rand Corporation, and at the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. His central interests were in long-run economic change. Much of his research was directed toward understanding technological change, how economic institutions and public policies influence the evolution of technology, and how technological change in turn induces institutional and economic change more broadly. Along with Sidney Winter, he pioneered development of a way of economic theorizing that recognizes explicitly that the economy is almost always undergoing change, most of it unpredictable, and that theories that assume that economic agents understand well the context in which they are operating, and that the system is in equilibrium, are inadequate for analysis of many important economic questions. His book with Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, is widely recognized as a landmark in this field.