Innovation policy can be a crucial component of governments' responses to crises. Because speed is a paramount … objective, crisis innovation may also require different policy tools than innovation policy in non-crisis times, raising … distinct questions and tradeoffs. In this paper, we survey the U.S. policy response to two crises where innovation was crucial …

-produced penicillin, antimalarials, and a flu vaccine. We draw on this episode to discuss the economics of crisis innovation. Since the …

This report surveys the empirical literature from economics and related fields on patents and innovation. In particular …, it reviews and synthesizes the empirical evidence on patents and first-generation innovation, the disclosure function of … patents, and patents and follow-on innovation. The main results are summarized in fifteen charts …

World War II innovation model in other crises. In this essay we describe exactly how it worked. We do so first through a … general overview of how OSRD approached several questions that may confront any crisis innovation effort: priority setting … innovation policy different, how crisis innovation policy approaches may vary, and the limits to generalizing from World War II …

As an empirical example of this externality, we analyze the innovation induced by the obesity epidemic. Obesity is … associated with an increase in the incidence of many diseases. The induced innovation hypothesis is that an increase in the … incidence of a disease will increase technological innovation specific to that disease. The empirical economics literature has …

opportunities. The paper also provides new evidence on induced pharmaceutical innovation. In both cases we use the change in the … demographic structure of the market (measured by age structure and obesity prevalence) to test the induced innovation hypothesis … pharmaceutical innovation responds to aging- and obesity-induced changes in potential market size …