The Kauffman Foundation has just published a new book, entitled The New Entrepreneurial Growth Agenda. It is packed full of great essays examining the reasons behind today’s slowdown in growth, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and how these worrisome trends can be reversed.
I’m honored to have an essay in this volume, “Where is Innovation Falling Short?: Using Labor Market Indicators to Map the Successful Innovation Frontier.” In this essay, I suggest that the US is suffering from “uneven innovation.” In areas such as IT, robotics, and oil/gas exploration and production, the innovation frontier is expanding very rapidly. Meanwhile regulatory headwinds, among other factors, has held back the innovation frontier in other critical areas, such as biosciences and materials sciences.To support this argument, the essay uses a new approach based on labor market indicators—specifically, occupational employment from government surveys and online help-wanted ads from aggregators—to map out areas of successful innovation in detail.
This essay was discussed by Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal last August in a piece called “Beyond the Internet, Innovation Struggles”. In future blog posts, I’m going to discuss the policy and political implications of this analysis.
