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 …

Innovation policy involves trading off monopoly output and pricing in the short run in exchange for incentives for … firms to develop new products in the future. While existing research demonstrates that expected profits fuel R&D investments …

War II. In 1940, a group of top U.S. science administrators organized a major coordinated research effort to support the … Allied war effort, including significant investments in medical research which yielded innovations like mass …-produced penicillin, antimalarials, and a flu vaccine. We draw on this episode to discuss the economics of crisis innovation. Since the …

research remains an isolated or 'ivory tower' activity, with weak connectivity to public use, little relationship between the … quality of research and its public use, and little correspondence between the funding of science and its public use. This …

-established Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) entered thousands of R&D contracts with industrial and academic … paper, we study the long-run effects of the OSRD-supported research effort on U.S. invention. Using data on all OSRD …

government grants. We argue that there is no single best mechanism for supporting research. Rather, mechanisms can only be … an intramural activity to largely a grant process. Finally, we observe that much research is supported by a hybrid system …

European countries do less research than Japan and the United States. We use a quantitative multi-country growth model … to ask: (i) Why is this so? (ii) Would there be any benefit to expanding research in Europe? (iii) What would various … European research promotion policies do? We find that (i) Europe's lower research effort has more to do with the smaller …

Research which explores unchartered waters has a high potential for major impact but also carries a higher uncertainty … of having impact. Such explorative research is often described as taking a novel approach. This study examines the … complex relationship between pursuing a novel approach and impact. Viewing scientific research as a combinatorial process, we …

relating to patenting, robust conclusions regarding the empirical consequences for technological innovation of changes in … patent policy are few. Possible reasons for these limited results are discussed, and possible avenues for future research are …