In the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, executives and policymakers are motivated than ever to reduce the vulnerability of social and economic systems to disasters. Most prior work on critical infrastructure protection has focused on the responsibilities and actions of government rather than on those of the private sector firms that provide most vital services. Seeds of Disaster, Roots of Response is the first systematic attempt to understand how private decisions and operations affect public vulnerability. It describes effective and sustainable approaches both business strategies and public policies to ensure provision of critical services in the event of disaster. The authors are business leaders from multiple industries and experts in fields as diverse as risk analysis, economics, engineering, organization theory and public policy. The book shows the necessity of deeply rooted collaboration between private and public institutions, and the accountability and leadership required to go from words to action.

Lewis Branscomb and Philip Auerswald address early-stage, high-tech innovation in the context of business decision making and innovation policy. How do technology innovators, business executives, and venture capitalists manage the technical elements of business risk when developing and launching new products? Overcoming technical risks requires crossing the so-called valley of death-the gap between demonstrating the soundness of a technical concept in a controlled setting and readying the product technology for the market. Crossing the valley of death may mean bringing university-based research to the point where it appears viable to venture capitalists, or bridging the cultural gap between technical innovators and the managers who are being asked to risk their institutional resources. In every context, purely technical risks are coupled with the market risks inherent in innovation. In this book Lewis Branscomb and Philip Auerswald address early-stage, high-tech innovation in the context of business decision making and innovation policy. The topics addressed include the extent to which purely technical risk is separable from market risk; how industrial managers make decisions on funding early-stage, high-risk technology projects; and under what circumstances government can and should act to reduce the technical risks of innovative projects so that firms will invest in them. The book includes contributions by Mary Good, George Hartmann, James McGroddy, Mike Myers, Michael Roberts, and F. M. Scherer.

The "code economy " refers to the evolving technologically-driven environment we live in. In services or manufacturing, outputs emerge more and more from coded computerized systems and less as assembled mechanical devices and procedures. Industries seek algorithms to make software not only more pliable for firms' development of products and services, but also to market them and ease their purchase and use by consumers. This process automates jobs. It gives increasing economic advantage to entrepreneurs who can harness "code " to serve on the large scale the growing niches into which consumers are organized. Yet, mastering the "code " also gives individuals and informal social networks the resources to bundle products and services and put them up for sale and convenient use at more local levels. The economics of the rest of the 21st century will see the movement away from traditional firms and more toward people's relying on themselves as the sources of their livelihoods. The code economy has clearly not developed in a vacuum. Invention, innovation, and the pursuit of happiness have characterized human activities for centuries. What is changing is how societies and individuals radically value endeavors in life differently from even a decade ago, most notably away from industries organized as "command and control " systems. In The Code Economy, Philip Auerswald investigates how economists themselves have been hard pressed to gauge new economic indices of satisfaction that go beyond traditional measures. He explores how the code or "shared " economy reaches into domains such as health, where greater longevity, the popularization of medical knowledge, and the emphases on preventive care and wellness will complement the delivery of medical services. Further, living in the code economy will prompt people to orient their children's futures to more self-reliant pursuits and seek investments that truly serve them and not the institutions that have traditionally dominated the financial and economic worlds.

In the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, executives and policymakers are motivated than ever to reduce the vulnerability of social and economic systems to disasters. Most prior work on critical infrastructure protection has focused on the responsibilities and actions of government rather than on those of the private sector firms that provide most vital services. Seeds of Disaster, Roots of Response is the first systematic attempt to understand how private decisions and operations affect public vulnerability. It describes effective and sustainable approaches both business strategies and public policies to ensure provision of critical services in the event of disaster. The authors are business leaders from multiple industries and experts in fields as diverse as risk analysis, economics, engineering, organization theory and public policy. The book shows the necessity of deeply rooted collaboration between private and public institutions, and the accountability and leadership required to go from words to action.