Entrepreneurial Energy : Its Creation and Capture - a Policy Perspective of Economics and Innovation

This perspective-research paper addresses the view that government support of research violates free market principles. It defines "entrepreneurial energy" to provide a perspective for identifying the stages that an innovation passes through before creating value, uses descriptive economics to distinguish between the innovation's public and private good stages, and concludes that free market principles call for publicly funded research to play a central and complementary role with privately funded research. This conclusion is tested through analyses of the electronics and the biotechnology industries. National Science Foundation data suggests that private innovation is likely to decline in response to recent trends in government support of research