[2] However, the formal founding meeting was only held in September 1989 at the association's first annual conference in Keswick, Cumbria, UK.

In contrast to standard economic approaches focusing exclusively on equilibrium, EAEPE conceptualizes the economy as a cumulative process unfolding in historical time in which agents are faced with chronic information problems and radical uncertainty about the future.

Contrary to standard models where individuals and their tastes are taken as given, where technology is viewed as exogenous, and where production is separated from exchange, EAEPE's concern is to address and encompass the interactive, social process through which tastes are formed and changed, the forces which promote technological transformation, and the interaction of these elements within the economic system as a whole.

Rejecting the utilitarian outlook which separates considerations of means from those of ends, and judgments of fact from those of value, and which ignores social relations, conflicts and inequalities between the agents, EAEPE appreciates the fact that inquiry is value-driven and policy-orientated, and recognises the centrality of participatory democratic processes to the identification and evaluation of real needs.

[6] More generally, EAEPE recognises the relevance of writers as diverse as John Commons, Nicholas Kaldor, Michał Kalecki, William Kapp, John Maynard Keynes, Alfred Marshall, Karl Marx, François Perroux, Karl Polanyi, Joan Robinson, Joseph Schumpeter, Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen and Max Weber to institutionalist and evolutionary thought.