Economics of innovation
How incentives and investment shape technological development, and how innovation affects productivity and growth.
Research Program 01
Innovation and Economics
Innovation, markets, and economic change
Examines how economic institutions shape technological development and how innovation, in turn, reorganizes markets and productive activity.
Innovation is an institutional and economic process.
Scientific discoveries acquire economic value through institutions capable of financing, developing, and diffusing them. The program examines why those arrangements generate different forms of innovation across industries and regions.
Research also asks how technological change alters productivity and competition, and how those changes redistribute economic opportunity.
Areas of inquiry
Core research domains
Firms, markets, and competition
How firms and market organization shape technological direction, and how technological change alters competition and economic organization.
Finance and financial systems
How financial institutions shape technological development through capital allocation and how new technologies reorganize financial activity and infrastructure.
Labor, skills, and organizations
How organizations shape the adoption and use of technology, and how technological change reorganizes work, expertise, and organizational capability.
Innovation systems and economic development
How institutional systems build technological capability and how those capabilities, in turn, reshape patterns of economic development.
Guiding questions
- Which institutional arrangements enable technological ideas to become productive capabilities?
- How do firms and market organization influence technological direction and competition?
- How do financial institutions shape technological development, and how does technological change reshape finance?
- Under what conditions does technological change increase productivity, and how are its gains distributed?
- How do organizations shape technological adoption, and how does technology reshape work and expertise?
- How do institutional systems build durable technological capabilities across regions and industries?