The Role of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Economic Growth

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.

Michael J. Andrews is assistant professor of economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Aaron K. Chatterji is the Mark Burgess and Lisa Benson-Burgess Distinguished Professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Josh Lerner is chair of the Entrepreneurial Management Unit and the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School. He is a research associate and codirector of the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Scott Stern is the David Sarnoff Professor of Management and chair of the Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management Group at MIT Sloan School of Management. He is a research associate and director of the Innovation Policy Working Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research.