141 Items

Book - Oxford University Press

Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies

| July 2016

This book explores the sources and dynamics of social opposition to innovation. It:

  • Explains the roots of resistance to new technologies - and why such resistance is not always futile
  • Draws on nearly 600 years of economic history to show how the balance of winners and losers shapes technological controversies
  • Outlines policy strategies for inclusive innovation to reduce the risks and maximize the benefits of new technologies

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Book - Oxford University Press

The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa

| September 2015

The New Harvest argues that Africa can feed itself in a generation and help contribute to global food security despite its history of persistent food shortages and the rising threat of climate change. This new edition provides ideas on how to place agriculture at the center of the continent's long-term economic transformation. It demonstrates how policy coordination can help realize agriculture's full potential as a motherboard for other economic activities.

The full text of The New Harvest is available here.

Book - Cambridge University Press

Transforming U.S. Energy Innovation

How much should the U.S. government invest on energy R&D, and where should those investments be focused? How can the government work with the private sector to accelerate energy innovation? This book addresses these and other important questions to meet the energy challenge with new analytical methods and data.

Book - MIT Press

The Globalization of Clean Energy Technology: Lessons from China

| April 2014

The development and deployment of cleaner energy technologies have become globalized phenomena. Yet despite the fact that energy-related goods account for more than ten percent of international trade, policy makers, academics, and the business community perceive barriers to the global diffusion of these emerging technologies. Experts point to problems including intellectual property concerns, trade barriers, and developing countries' limited access to technology and funding. In this book, Kelly Gallagher uses analysis and case studies from China's solar photovoltaic, gas turbine, advanced battery, and coal gasification industries to examine both barriers and incentives in clean energy technology transfer.

Book Chapter

Entrepreneurship

| January 2011

The creation of agricultural enterprises represents one of the most effective ways to stimulate rural development. This chapter will review the efficacy of the policy tools used to promote agricultural enterprises, with a particular focus on the positive, transformative role that can be played by the private sector. Inspired by such examples, this chapter will end by exploring ways in which African countries, subregional, and regional bodies can create incentives that stimulate entrepreneurship in the agricultural sector. The chapter will take into account new tools such as information and communication technologies and the extent to which they can be harnessed to promote entrepreneurship.

Book Chapter

Advances in Science, Technology, and Engineering

| January 2011

"The Green Revolution played a critical role in helping to overcome chronic food shortages in Latin America and Asia. The Green Revolution was largely a result of the creation of new institutional arrangements aimed at using existing technology to improve agricultural productivity. African countries are faced with enormous technological challenges. But they also have access to a much larger pool of scientific and technical knowledge than was available when the Green Revolution was launched in the 1950s."

Book Chapter

The New Harvest: Introduction

| January 2011

"This book argues that sustaining African economic prosperity will require significant efforts to modernize the continent's economy through the application of science and technology in agriculture. In other words, agriculture needs to be viewed as a knowledge-based entrepreneurial activity. The argument is based on the premise that smart investments in agriculture will have multiplier effects in many sectors of the economy and help spread prosperity. More specifically, the book focuses on the importance of boosting support for agricultural research as part of a larger agenda to promote innovation, invest in enabling infrastructure, build human capacity, stimulate entrepreneurship and improve the governance of innovation."

Book - Brookings Institution Press

Acting in Time on Energy Policy

| May 2009

Energy policy is on everyone's mind these days. The U.S. presidential campaign focused on energy independence and exploration ("Drill, baby, drill!"), climate change, alternative fuels, even nuclear energy. But there is a serious problem endemic to America's energy challenges. Policymakers tend to do just enough to satisfy political demands but not enough to solve the real problems, and they wait too long to act. The resulting policies are overly reactive, enacted once damage is already done, and they are too often incomplete, incoherent, and ineffectual. Given the gravity of current economic, geopolitical, and environmental concerns, this is more unacceptable than ever. This important volume details this problem, making clear the unfortunate results of such short-sighted thinking, and it proposes measures to overcome this counterproductive tendency.

Book Chapter

Policy for Energy Technology Innovation

| May 2009

"The United States ought to be the leader of the world in the energy technology innovation that is needed. It has the largest economy, uses the most energy (and within that total the most oil), has made the largest cumulative contribution to the atmospheric buildup of fossil carbon dioxide that is the dominant driver of global climate change, has a large balance of payments stake in competitiveness in the global energy technology market as well as a large stake in the worldwide economic and security benefits of meeting global energy needs in affordable and sustainable ways, and possesses by many measures the most capable scientific and engineering workforce in the world. The actual performance of this country in energy-technology innovation, however, has been falling short by almost every measure...."

Book Chapter

Oil Security and the Transportation Sector

| May 2009

"This chapter proposes to answer five fundamental questions: What exactly is the oil security problem, and how serious is it going forward? Why has it emerged at this point in time, and why has it been so difficult for the U.S. government to take the actions needed to mitigate it? Finally, what alternative policies are likely to be effective as the United States attempts to improve its oil security in the future?"