Ben Rogge and the members of Wabash College’s John Van Sickle Club in 1973. Source of image: The Wabash 1973 Yearbook, p. 173.
In explaining Schumpeter’s concept of competition within the process of creative destruction, I have long thought the phrase "leapfrog competition" was apt. I have no memory of Schumpter himself using the phrase, but did think I remembered Rogge using the phrase.
Today (4/21/06) I used the Amazon.com "Search within the Book" feature to search for the "leapfrog", "leap-frog", and "frog" in Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. No use of any of the three was found. This provides some support to my belief that Schumpeter himself did not use the phrase.
I also today examined my lecture notes from Benjamin Rogge’s Comparative Economic Systems course at Wabash College. In the midst of a discussion of creative destruction on 1/25/73, I note "leap-frogging analogy" which supports my memory that Rogge made use of the phrase "leapfrog competition" in class.
In terms of in-print uses of the analogy, I have performed the same three searches using Liberty Fund’s HTML version of Rogge’s Can Capitalism Survive? I found one "hit" which appears on p. 22 of the print versions of the book.
The technical description of the market structure, in the language of the textbook model, would be that of “oligopoly”—the rule of the few.
All of this Schumpeter would label as nonsense. Why? Because the investigator would be examining “each year—taken separately” rather than the never-ending game of leapfrog that the data reveal and that represents the true nature of the competitive process.
I will be in the debt of anyone who can show me an earlier use of the word "leapfrog" in the context of a discussion of competiton in Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction.