Failure to recognise that economic growth is mostly better rather than more is why the sages who have repeatedly predicted that growth must end because we will run out of – first it was wood, then it was coal, then nitrates and then oil – have always been wrong. We haven’t run out of arable land and our progress will not be halted by a shortage of lithium. All physical resources have finite limits, but human ingenuity does not.

The unprecedented prosperity of the modern world is the result of the growth of our collective intelligence.

For an economist who taught that profit could be sustained only as a result of competitive advantage, this diversification raised a simple question. And some businessmen on the board, accustomed to a world in which profit is earned only by meeting customer needs, encountered the same difficulty.

For Penrose, the firm was defined not by the assets it owned or the contracts it made but by its capabilities and its ability to deploy those capabilities in productive services: ‘All the evidence we have indicates that the growth of firms is connected with the attempts of a particular group of people to do something.’ Perhaps that seems obvious. But her emphasis

on ‘the group’ recognises the centrally cooperative nature of business activity, and her identification of purpose – ‘to do something’ – establishes its problem-related focus.

Today the hallmark of successful business is access to collective intelligence that is not common property.