Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Some Links

  1. Lessons From 175 Years of Innovation, in Fortune (via @TheBIF). A profile of Proctor & Gamble's Connect & Develop program and P&G's emphasis on open innovation. Here is an HBR study by two researchers within P&G.
  2. For academic types, SSRN's CiteReader is pretty amazing. Check out a project update here.
  3. Francis Fukuyama has been out promoting his latest book, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. He spoke at SAIS on Monday and the video is below.
  4. Banerjee and Duflo's piece in Foreign Policy has been getting tons of press, befitting two scholars of their stature. Worth a read.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Frontier Economics

Brink Lindsay at Kauffman has a new paper titled Frontier Economics: Why Entrepreneurial Capitalism is Needed Now More than Ever (pdf). The gist is that, "the changing nature of economic growth means that prosperity is actually more, not less, reliant on free, competitive markets." And:
The richer nations get, the more they "rely on innovation to keep growth going – and, therefore, the more we need free-market policies that foster the creation of new businesses and the implementation of new ideas," Lindsey said in the report. "If we are to rise out of the current slump and launch a new, 21st-century boom, it is in the direction of freer, more competitive markets that our policies must turn."



The role of the frontier has been studied by Zoltan Acs and David Miller as well, although their conception is slightly different (see here for starters). Hopefully David will read the paper and offer his thoughts, although I imagine, like me, he'll mostly agree with the main ideas.