communicate valuable knowledge to an entrepreneur, facilitating innovation. The venture capitalist can also communicate the …This paper explores a new role for venture capitalists, as knowledge intermediaries. A venture capital investor can … entrepreneur's innovative knowledge to other portfolio companies. We study the costs and benefits of these two forms of knowledge …

imitate by hiring a worker from a firm that has already innovated. We show that if innovation firms can commit to long … contracts, there is too little innovation and too much imitation in equilibrium. Our model is tractable and allows us to analyze … welfare effects of various policies in the limited commitment case. We find that subsidizing innovation and taxing imitation …