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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 …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012585399
-produced penicillin, antimalarials, and a flu vaccine. We draw on this episode to discuss the economics of crisis innovation. Since the …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012482553
During World War II, the U.S. government launched an unprecedented effort to mobilize science for war: the newly-established Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) entered thousands of R&D contracts with industrial and academic contractors, spending one to two orders of magnitude...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012481570
AT&T was the largest U.S. firm for most of the 20th century. Telephone operators once comprised over 50% of its workforce, but in the late 1910s it initiated a decades-long process of automating telephone operation with mechanical call switching--a technology first invented in the 1880s. We...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012794608
Though fundamental to innovation and essential to many industries and occupations, individual creativity has received … for the management of creative workers and for the implementation of competitive procurement mechanisms for innovation …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012480710
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 …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012482128
Telephone operation, one of the most common jobs for young American women in the early 1900s, provided hundreds of thousands of female workers a pathway into the labor force. Between 1920 and 1940, AT&T adopted mechanical switching technology in more than half of the U.S. telephone network,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012482280
Using the farm tractor as a case study, I show that lags in technology diffusion arise along two distinct margins, which I term scale and scope. Though tractors are now used in nearly every agricultural field operation and in the production of nearly all crops, they first developed with much...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453589