Josh Lerner – författare

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 3, synthesizes key findings about entrepreneurial and innovative activity in the U.S. economy, conveying insights on contemporary challenges and providing an analytical base for policy design. In the first paper, Jorge Guzman, Fiona Murray, Scott Stern, and Heidi Williams examine regional innovation engines and highlight the place-specific actions, potential bottlenecks, and roles of different stakeholders in catalyzing entrepreneurship and innovation. Next, Lee Branstetter and Guangwei Li examine the challenges faced by the Chinese central government in implementing industrial policy to push the technology frontier while local governments and businesses deploy resources to advance their own, not necessarily aligned, interests. Turning to climate issues, James Sallee analyzes policies aimed at accelerating the energy transition by hastening the replacement of durable capital assets like automobiles and residential appliances that last for decades and slow the adoption of cleaner technologies. Joshua Gans studies cryptocurrencies and other crypto-token-based instruments and the broad range of government responses to them, particularly in the U.S. Finally, Ina Ganguli and Fabian Waldinger consider the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the human capital in the Ukrainian science community.

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.Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 4, synthesizes key findings about entrepreneurial and innovative activity in many sectors of the economy, conveying insights on contemporary challenges and seeking to inform policy. Several research papers address issues related to artificial intelligence (AI). In the first paper, Pierre Azoulay, Joshua Krieger, and Abhishek Nagaraj examine the future evolution of AI and its potential effects on market structure and competition. Next, Gaétan de Rassenfosse, Adam B. Jaffe, and Joel Waldfogel focus on how generative AI may influence creative activities and the intellectual property system. Martin Beraja, Wenwei Peng, David Y. Yang, and Noam Yuchtman examine Chinese government investment in the AI sector. Turning to research funding models, Arielle D’Souza, Kendall Hoyt, Christopher M. Snyder, and Alec Stapp elucidate the key features of Operation Warp Speed, which delivered effective vaccines in record time, and consider other settings in which this approach to research support might be applicable. Next, Christoph Carnehl, Marco Ottaviani, and Justus Preusser study the design of scientific research grants more broadly, analyzing existing grant systems and identifying key tradeoffs as well as open research issues. Finally, Amy Nice highlights the role of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce in supporting the US defense sector and examines US workforce needs and immigration policy through this lens.

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 volume of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy series brings rigorous new economic research to bear on a number of current policy issues. Andrew Fieldhouse and Karel Mertens quantify the social returns to public R&D and find that federal investments have yielded extraordinarily high productivity payoffs. They argue that cuts to non-defense R&D risk long-run damage to economic growth. Douglas Elmendorf, Glenn Hubbard, and Zachary Liscow examine the interaction of innovation-friendly growth-oriented policies with deficit reduction and conclude that while such policies alone cannot stabilize federal debt, they can meaningfully ease fiscal pressures. Nirupama Rao and Timothy Simcoe document the effectiveness of R&D tax credits while highlighting design challenges such as the need to ensure that credits stimulate additional research rather than subsidize activity that firms would have undertaken in their absence. Kyle Myers, Lauren Lanahan, and Evan Johnson analyze the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and show that small firms supported through SBIR pursue distinctive strategies compared to venture-backed startups. Pierre Azoulay, Daniel Gross, and Bhaven Sampat analyze indirect cost recovery, the system by which research universities are reimbursed for overhead. Fiona Paine, Richard Townsend, and Ting Xu assess restrictions on foreign investment in startups, weighing national security concerns against the costs to innovation ecosystems. Aaron Chatterji and Fiona Murray argue that geopolitics is fundamentally reshaping the economics of innovation, and distill the implications of this development for the approaches that are used in studying innovation policy.

The 5th edition of Lerner's Venture Capital and Private Equity: A Casebook continues to present the important historical cases of private equity while incorporating a number of new relevant and timely cases from previous best-selling issues. It includes more cases relevant to the texts four main goals: understanding the ways in which private equity firms work, applying the key ideas of corporate finance to the industry, understanding the process of valuation, and critiquing valuation approaches of the past and present- an approach which has proved very successful over the past four editions.This casebook contains cases and notes designed to provide an understanding of the history of the private equity industry's development and the workings of the industry today. By explaining the industry on a case-by-case basis, this text promises to address the critical question of whether gains made in recent years have been sustained and how firms will respond to the current opportunities and challenges.

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.

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.

How corporations have increasingly embraced the sharing of knowledge as a competitive strategyInnovation is more important than ever, yet breakthroughs are becoming harder to achieve. Modern technologies, from artificial intelligence and 5G networks to biotech, are so complex that they require collaboration across companies, industries, and countries. Increasingly, firms are discovering that sharing knowledge can be more powerful, and more profitable, than guarding it. In Rethinking Innovation, distinguished economists Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole examine ways that corporations have embraced the sharing of knowledge as a competitive strategy. Open-source software, for example, has seen multibillion-dollar public offerings and shifting business strategies, producing high-profile disputes over what openness actually entails. Across high-tech industries, new forms of knowledge-sharing are transforming how companies develop and exploit new technologies.Lerner and Tirole explore three key organizational structures that make this collaboration possible: patent pools, which bundle essential patents and make them available to firms seeking to license them; standard-setting organizations, where companies agree on common technical templates and commit to making related patents available on fair terms; and open-source communities, in which users share innovations freely with others. Drawing on decades of pioneering research, Lerner and Tirole explain how these institutions emerged, how they work in practice, and how they can both promote innovation and create new challenges for competition and policy. Combining economic insight with vivid case studies—from early efforts to coordinate aircraft patents to contemporary battles over artificial intelligence and global technology standards—Rethinking Innovation reveals how firms collaborate to develop and commercialize complex technologies. Clear and accessible throughout, this book offers a guide to the forces reshaping modern innovation for managers, policymakers, and scholars.

How to overcome barriers to the long-term investments that are essential for solving the world’s biggest problemsThere 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.

How to overcome barriers to the long-term investments that are essential for solving the world’s biggest problemsThere 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 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