Pavitt's Taxonomy categorizes mostly large industrial firms along trajectories of technological change according to sources of technology, requirements of the users, and appropriability regime (Pavitt 1984).
The taxonomy aims to classify innovation modes according to different sectoral groups and the flow of knowledge between such groups.
It was first proposed by Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) researcher Keith Pavitt at the University of Sussex and has since been applied in innovation research to describe and categorize industries and the firms therein (Archibugi 2001).
According to Castellacci (2008), "Pavitt's model of the linkages between science-based, specialized suppliers, scale-intensive and supplier-dominated industries provides a stylized and powerful description of the core set of industrial sectors that sustained the growth of advanced economies during the Fordist age."
Pavitt's taxonomy consists of four categories of industrial firms: