PPI Senior Fellow Michael Mandel discusses the need to reinvest in American innovation with the Washington Post reporter Brian Vastag:
Innovation scholars point to a “valley of death” where new technologies go to die. The federal government funds basic research. Private industry commercializes technologies springing from that work. But crossing the chasm between the two can be hugely difficult.
“We have investors with lots of money, and we have entrepreneurs with ideas that can get you across the valley of death,” said Michael Mandel, an economist who tracks American innovation for the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. “But it’s a lot easier when you have a big winner out there, a gleaming star in the distance.”
