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Intelligently allocating research effort and funds requires deciding whether to build on recent advances or on more established knowledge. When recent advances create superior opportunities for invention, their adoption as research inputs in the invention process promotes technological progress....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013065176
-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/10013251453
New ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did. A popular explanation for stagnation is that good ideas are harder to find, rendering slowdown inevitable. We present a simple model of the lifecycle of scientific ideas that points to changes in scientist incentives as the cause of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012841421
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/10013292242
an induced innovation externality. This alternative mechanism, by contrast, causes people to devote an inefficiently high … level of self-protection. 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 …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012772375
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/10012911076
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/10012941162
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 …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012750249
life, while laying the foundation for postwar innovation policy. Scholars and policymakers have appealed to the wartime … innovation effort: priority setting, selecting and engaging researchers, a funding mechanism, coordinating research efforts, and … framework for decision-making. We conclude by discussing other lessons from OSRD, such as what makes crisis innovation policy …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013294699
A key decision in research is whether to try out new ideas or build on more established ideas. In this paper, we evaluate which type of work is more likely to spur further invention. When recent advances create superior opportunities for invention, their adoption as research inputs in the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013029014