How to overcome barriers to the long-term investments that are essential for solving the world's biggest problems There has never been a greater need for long-term investments to tackle the world's most difficult problems, such as climate change and decaying infrastructure. And it is increasingly unlikely that the public sector will be willing or able to fill this gap. If these critical needs are to be met, the major pools of long-term, patient capital-including pensions, sovereign wealth funds, university endowments, and wealthy individuals and families-will have to play a large role. In this accessible and authoritative account of long-term capital investment, two leading experts on the subject, Harvard Business School professors Victoria Ivashina and Josh Lerner, highlight the significant hurdles facing long-term investors and propose concrete ways to overcome these difficulties. Presenting the best evidence in an engaging way by using memorable stories and examples, Patient Capital describes how large investors increasingly want and need long-run investments that have the potential to deliver greater returns than those in the public markets. Yet success in such investments has been the exception. Performance has suffered from both the limitations of investors and the internal structure of their fund managers, often resulting in the wrong incentives and a lack of long-term planning. Yet the challenges facing long-term investors can be surmounted and the rewards are potentially large, both for investors and society as a whole. Patient Capital shows how to make long-term investment work better for everyone.

The seventeenth volume of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Innovation Policy and the Economy provides an accessible forum for bringing the work of leading academic researchers to an audience of policymakers and those interested in the interaction between public policy and innovation. In the first chapter, Joel Waldfogel discusses how reduced costs of production have resulted in a "Golden Age of Television," arguing that this development has gone underappreciated. The second chapter, by Marc Rysman and Scott Schuh, discusses the prospects for innovation in payment systems, including mobile payments, faster payment systems, and digital currencies. In the third chapter, Catherine Tucker and Amalia Miller analyze the consequences of patient data becoming virtually costless to store, share, and individualize, showing how data management and privacy issues have become a key factor in health policy. The fourth chapter, by Michael Luca, examines how online marketplaces have proliferated over the past decade, evolving far beyond the pioneers such as eBay and Amazon. In the fifth chapter, Tim Bresnahan and Pai-Ling Yin characterize information and communication technologies in the workplace, addressing how wages vary with increasing demand for smart managers and professionals, and workers with organizational participation skills.

How to overcome barriers to the long-term investments that are essential for solving the world's biggest problems There has never been a greater need for long-term investments to tackle the world's most difficult problems, such as climate change, human health, and decaying infrastructure. And it is increasingly unlikely that the public sector will be willing or able to fill this gap. If these critical needs are to be met, the major pools of long-term, patient capital-including pensions, sovereign wealth funds, university endowments, and wealthy individuals and families-will have to play a large role. In this accessible and authoritative account of long-term capital investment, two leading experts on the subject, Victoria Ivashina and Josh Lerner, highlight the significant hurdles facing long-term investors and propose concrete ways to overcome these difficulties.

The papers in the sixteenth volume of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Innovation Policy and the Economy offer insights into the changing landscape of innovation by highlighting recent developments in the financing of innovation and entrepreneurship and in the economics of innovation and intellectual property. The first chapter, by Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, explores the process of experimentation in the context of financing of technology start-ups by venture capitalists. The second, by Yael Hochberg, also analyzes the role of entrepreneurial experimentation by systematically examining the rise of start-up accelerators. The third chapter, by Heidi Williams, studies the relationship between the strength of intellectual property rights and innovation. The fourth paper, by Fiona Scott Morton and Carl Shapiro discusses recent changes to the patent system and whether they align the rewards from intellectual property with the marginal contributions made by innovators and other stakeholders. The final chapter, by Karim Lakhani and Kevin Boudreau, focuses on the potential use of field innovation experiments and contests to inform innovation policy and management. Together, these essays continue to highlight the importance of economic theory and empirical analysis in innovation policy research.

Silicon Valley, Singapore, Tel Aviv--the global hubs of entrepreneurial activity--all bear the marks of government investment. Yet, for every public intervention that spurs entrepreneurial activity, there are many failed efforts that waste untold billions in taxpayer dollars. When has governmental sponsorship succeeded in boosting growth, and when has it fallen terribly short? Should the government be involved in such undertakings at all? "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" is the first extensive look at the ways governments have supported entrepreneurs and venture capitalists across decades and continents. Josh Lerner, one of the foremost experts in the field, provides valuable insights into why some public initiatives work while others are hobbled by pitfalls, and he offers suggestions for how public ventures should be implemented in the future.

Discussing the complex history of Silicon Valley and other pioneering centers of venture capital, Lerner uncovers the extent of government influence in prompting growth. He examines the public strategies used to advance new ventures, points to the challenges of these endeavors, and reveals the common flaws undermining far too many programs--poor design, a lack of understanding for the entrepreneurial process, and implementation problems. Lerner explains why governments cannot dictate how venture markets evolve, and why they must balance their positions as catalysts with an awareness of their limited ability to stimulate the entrepreneurial sector.

As governments worldwide seek to spur economic growth in ever more aggressive ways, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" offers an important caution. The book argues for a careful approach to government support of entrepreneurial activities, so that the mistakes of earlier efforts are not repeated.

The United States patent system has become sand rather than lubricant in the wheels of American progress. Such is the premise behind this provocative and timely book by two of the nation's leading experts on patents and economic innovation.

"Innovation and Its Discontents" tells the story of how recent changes in patenting--an institutional process that was created to nurture innovation--have wreaked havoc on innovators, businesses, and economic productivity. Jaffe and Lerner, who have spent the past two decades studying the patent system, show how legal changes initiated in the 1980s converted the system from a stimulator of innovation to a creator of litigation and uncertainty that threatens the innovation process itself.

In one telling vignette, Jaffe and Lerner cite a patent litigation campaign brought by a a semi-conductor chip designer that claims control of an entire category of computer memory chips. The firm's claims are based on a modest 15-year old invention, whose scope and influenced were broadened by secretly manipulating an industry-wide cooperative standard-setting body.

Such cases are largely the result of two changes in the patent climate, Jaffe and Lerner contend. First, new laws have made it easier for businesses and inventors to secure patents on products of all kinds, and second, the laws have tilted the table to favor patent holders, no matter how tenuous their claims.

After analyzing the economic incentives created by the current policies, Jaffe and Lerner suggest a three-pronged solution for restoring the patent system: create incentives to motivate parties who have information about the novelty of a patent; provide multiple levels of patent review; and replace juries with judges and special masters to preside over certain aspects of infringement cases.

Well-argued and engagingly written, "Innovation and Its Discontents" offers a fresh approach for enhancing both the nation's creativity and its economic growth.

The developed world is struggling with unsustainable promises and unappealing choices, and sustained economic growth represents one of the few ways out. And over the centuries, growth in advanced economies has been strongly linked to innovation. Despite the vast amounts written about innovation over the years, understanding of its drivers remains surprisingly limited. This book, by top Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner, seeks to remedy this shortfall. It highlights that while organizational economists have made strides in understanding what combinations of incentives and organization structure can encourage innovative breakthroughs, many of these insights have not yet received the attention they deserve in the real world, or been developed in ways that can easily be applied in real situations. The author focuses on two models for encouraging innovation, the corporate research laboratory and the start-up. Each model, while proven and successful, also faces significant challenges and ambiguities. A central argument is that there remains considerable potential for hybrids between these two approaches. This book draws on important research in economics and reviews different approaches to innovation, combining this with a series of case examples to explore the challenges that face start up firms, large firms, and nations. It is essential reading for anybody faced with the challenge of innovation.

"The Innovation Policy and the Economy" series provides a forum for research on the interactions among public policy, the innovation process, and the economy. Issues covered in Volume 11 are an exploration of innovation challenges in the health care and clean technology industries and the implications for public policy, a reconsideration of static antitrust analysis on innovation incentives, an examination of innovations in governance that encourage investment and growth, and the effect of the dynamic nature of scientific research and technological innovation on science policy.

Rigorous nonpartisan research on the effects of economic forces and public policy on entrepreneurship and innovation. Entrepreneurship and innovation are widely recognized as drivers of economic dynamics and long-term prosperity. This series communicates key findings about the implications of entrepreneurial and innovative activity across the economy. In the first paper, Joseph Barberio, Jacob Becraft, Zied Ben Chaouch, Dimitris Bertsimas, Tasuku Kitada, Michael Li, Andrew Lo, Kevin Shi, and Qingyang Xu explore pharmaceutical firms’ weak incentives to develop vaccines against prospective diseases—due to high investment risks, low expected returns, and the rarity of pandemics— and consider a portfolio approach to financing vaccine research. Next, Daniel Hemel and Lisa Larrimore Ouellette describe a “trilemma� between quality, price, and access that appears after a generic pharmaceuticals patent expires, and show that it is difficult in a regulatory context to achieve distinct goals around price, access, and quality simultaneously. In the third paper, Silvia Dalla Fontana and Ramana Nanda examine the role of patents in the transition to a carbon-free world. They find relative to other technological areas, “Net Zero patents� are close to the scientific frontier, but due to difficulties of commercializing inventions, the share of such patents that are venture-backed has been increasingly directed to areas outside clean tech and other “deep� technologies. Jacquelyn Pless examines the effects of divestment from firms in “dirty� industries on innovation to combat climate change, or “green innovation.� She finds that compared with divesting, investing in firms and engaging with green corporate governance practices may induce more green innovation. Next, Robert Fairlie and David Robinson find that Black-owned innovative-intensive new businesses start smaller than their peers and do not converge in size over time. Differential access to bank financing is a major factor. Also “soft information,� which can help new businesses without established track records, can increase barriers for black founders and limit entrepreneurial pathways to prosperity. Finally, Jonathan Gruber, Simon Johnson, and Enrico Moretti consider the regional concentration of innovative activity in the United States. They find that while the concentration of activity has net advantages today, understanding the long-term benefits of more diffuse innovation clusters —including equity, industrial diversification, and talent development—is important.  

This volume presents studies from experts in twelve industries, providing insights into the future role of innovation and entrepreneurship in driving economic growth across sectors. We live in an era in which innovation and entrepreneurship seem ubiquitous, particularly in regions like Silicon Valley, Boston, and the Research Triangle Park. But many metrics of economic growth, such as productivity growth and business dynamism, have been at best modest in recent years. The resolution of this apparent paradox is dramatic heterogeneity across sectors, with some industries seeing robust innovation and entrepreneurship and others seeing stagnation. By construction, the impact of innovation and entrepreneurship on overall economic performance is the cumulative impact of their effects on individual sectors. Understanding the potential for growth in the aggregate economy depends, therefore, on understanding the sector-by-sector potential for growth. This insight motivates the twelve studies of different sectors that are presented in this volume. Each study identifies specific productivity improvements enabled by innovation and entrepreneurship, for example as a result of new production technologies, increased competition, or new organizational forms. These twelve studies, along with three synthetic chapters, provide new insights on the sectoral patterns and concentration of the contributions of innovation and entrepreneurship to economic growth.

"Innovation Policy and the Economy" provides an ongoing forum for the presentation of research on the interactions among public policy, the innovation process, and the economy. Papers in this volume include a consideration of the complex set of innovation policy challenges that arise in managing publicly funded research, an examination of the increasingly visible role of philanthropic funding for science, a look at the increasingly contentious issue of public funding of growth-oriented entrepreneurship, and two papers that turn their attention to the evaluation of recent federal policy changes as the result of the America Invents Act and the America Competes Act.

"This book provides profound and balance insight into what venture capital is all about." In The Venture Capital Cycle, Paul Gompers and Josh Lerner correct widespread misperceptions about the nature and role of the venture capitalist and provide an accessible and comprehensive overview of the venture capital industry. Bringing together fifteen years of ground-breaking research into the form and function of venture capital firms, they examine the fund-raising, investing, and exit stages of venture capitalists. Three major themes run throughout the process: venture investors confront tremendous information and incentive problems; venture capital processes are inherently interrelated, and a complete understanding of the industry requires a full understanding of the venture cycle; and, unlike most financial markets, the venture capital industry adjusts very slowly to shifts in the demand for and the supply of investment capital.This second edition has been thoroughly revised in light of recent research findings, and includes six new chapters. The first part, on fund-raising, now includes a chapter that examines what determines the level of venture capital fund-raising and how tax policy influences the demand for venture capital. Three new chapters in the second part, on investing, examine what kind of distortions are introduced when the venture capital market goes dramatically up, a question prompted by the 1999-2000 market bubble; demonstrate that the venture capital industry does indeed spur innovation, an important determinant of economic growth; and examine whether and under what circumstances governments can be effective venture capitalists. Two new chapters in the third part, on exiting venture capital investments, discuss whether venture capital firms affiliated with investment-banks are prone to conflicts of interest with public offerings and how lockups on initial public offerings are used to limit conflicts of interest.

While the importance of innovation to economic development is widely understood, the conditions conducive to it remain the focus of much attention. This volume offers new contributions to fundamental questions relating to the economics of innovation and technological change. Central to the development of new technologies are institutional environments, and among the topics discussed are the roles played by universities and other nonprofit research institutions and the ways in which the allocation of funds between the public and private sectors affects innovation. Other essays examine the practice of open research and how the diffusion of information technology influences knowledge accumulation.

The Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce exceptional innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world.The inaugural medal winner, the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), is an innovative not-for-profit organization that promotes "participatory budgeting," an inclusive process that empowers community members to make informed decisions about public spending. More than 46,000 people in communities across the United States have decided how to spend $45 million through programs that PBP helped spark over the last five years. In Everyone Counts, PBP co-founder and executive director Josh Lerner provides a concise history of the organization's origins and its vision, highlighting its real-world successes in fostering grassroots budgeting campaigns in such cities as New York, Boston, and Chicago. As more and more communities turn to participatory budgeting as a means of engaging citizens, prioritizing civic projects, and allocating local, state, and federal funding, this cogent volume will offer guidance and inspiration to others who want to transform democracy in the United States and elsewhere."The Participatory Budgeting Project exemplifies the essential features the award committee was looking for in its inaugural recipient. Political and economic inequality is part of the American national discussion, and participatory budgeting helps empower marginalized groups that do not normally take part in a process that is so critical for democratic life."- John Gastil, Director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy

"Innovation Policy and the Economy" provides an ongoing forum for the presentation of research on the interactions among public policy, the innovation process, and the economy. Papers in this volume include a consideration of the complex set of innovation policy challenges that arise in managing publicly funded research, an examination of the increasingly visible role of philanthropic funding for science, a look at the increasingly contentious issue of public funding of growth-oriented entrepreneurship, and two papers that turn their attention to the evaluation of recent federal policy changes as the result of the America Invents Act and the America Competes Act.

Papers in this volume highlight the increasing role of the Internet and digitization in the changing nature of innovation, entrepreneurship, and innovation policy. The first offers an overview of the impact of "big data" on the ability to conduct novel types of measurement and research in economics and related fields. The second highlights research designs used to evaluate the interplay between piracy, the availability of legitimate digital channels, and the impact of anti-piracy enforcement efforts. The third provides an overview of the rapidly emerging area of crowd funding, while the fourth focuses on the role of standard-setting organizations. The volume concludes with a look at geographic clusters, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

Each annual volume in the "Innovation Policy and the Economy" series provides a forum for research on the interactions among public policy, the innovation process, and the economy. A group of distinguished contributors covers all types of policy that affect the ability of an economy to achieve scientific and technological progress or that affect the impact of science and technology on economic growth. Among the issues covered in Volume 8 are policy challenges at the university-industry interface, the role of innovation and experimentation in the net neutrality debate, and the trade-offs in establishing the scope of patent rights or limitations on patent pools.

"Innovation Policy and the Economy" provides a forum for research on the interactions among public policy, the innovation process, and the economy. Issues covered in Volume 12 are an exploration of recent events in the US economy and their implications for innovation and growth; a consideration of the role of non-compete agreements in shaping labor market dynamics, the propensity for entrepreneurship, and regional migration; and more.

"Innovation Policy and the Economy" provides a forum for research on the interactions among public policy, the innovation process, and the economy. The distinguished contributors cover all types of policy that affect the ability of an economy to achieve scientific and technological progress or that affect the impact of science and technology on economic growth. Issues covered in Volume 9 include Congressional R & D spending on the physical sciences, intellectual property as a bargaining environment, pricing patents, and market design and innovation.