David Hart

George Mason University | GMU

In September, ministers will gather in Pittsburgh to consider how their governments should respond to the energy and climate innovation imperative. Building on Glasgow, the meeting should strive to fill critical gaps in areas such as capital-intensive demonstration projects and innovation-friendly trade in carbon-intensive goods.

Government programmes such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) are designed to help cleantech companies overcome startup challenges and bring innovations to market. New analysis shows that support from ARPA-E has led to higher patenting rates but success in winning follow-up funding remains unclear.

This report describes five tracks that state and local policymakers may follow as they pursue such strategies: Offering incentives to manufacturers and other investors Nurturing technology-based start-up companies Deepening existing clusters of related industries Substituting indigenous for imported energy resources Stimulating market demand for c...

The present enthusiasm in the climate and energy community about systems that combine Li-ion batteries with variable renewables is understandable. These batteries can fill in gaps of up to a few hours when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. This capacity allows the share of renewables on a grid to rise well above what would be feasi...

This paper provides an assessment of a portfolio of 53 energy technology demonstration projects that were initiated by the Obama administration between 2009 and 2011 and managed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). After reviewing the rationales for conducting such projects and providing partial public funding for them, five assessment criteria...

Some experts argue there is an inherent tension between environmental regulation and technological innovation. Environmental regulation deters risk taking that leads to innovation, according to their view. Other experts argue that environmental regulation and technological innovation are complementary. They hold that the need to comply with regulat...

A regional approach to demonstrating the commercial potential of major new energy technologies would open up new opportunities for accelerating innovation.

This paper argues in favor of four criteria for assessing the performance of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) within the Executive Office of the US President: trying to killing bad ideas (and sometimes succeeding), mobilizing expertise and confidence to support crisis response, identifying new issues and developing presidential po...

Scholars often conceive of international migration as a process centering on a transaction between the state and the individual. However, receiving states is increasingly delegating selection of immigrants, particularly highly-skilled immigrants to third parties, including companies, universities, and NGOs. This delegation leads to the possibility...

Immigrant entrepreneurs play an important role in the U.S. high-tech sector and may advance the country’s collaborative advantage through internationalization and globalization of start-ups. This study explores whether immigrant founding of U.S. high-tech firms, conditional on survival and sustained growth, contributes to their pursuing internation...

This article reports the results of a national survey that estimates the rate of immigrant entrepreneurship in a representative sample of high-impact firms in high-technology industries in the United States. The authors report key descriptive statistics about the companies and their founders. About 16% of the companies in the sample, for instance,...

This paper is motivated by the movement of foreign-born entrepreneurs out of ethnic enclaves and into the mainstream, globally-connected economies of the countries of immigration, and from necessity to opportunity entrepreneurship. The theoretical contribution of the paper is to integrate the emerging literature on foreign-born entrepreneurship wit...

This paper is motivated by the movement of foreign-born entrepreneurs out of ethnic enclaves and into the mainstream, globally-connected economies of the countries of immigration, and from necessity to opportunity entrepreneurship. We contribute to the emerging literature on immigration and entrepreneurship by integrating into it theoretical concep...

This paper relies on interviews and documentary evidence to describe federal RD&D policy for SO2 and NOx emissions controls for coal-fired power plants from 1970 to 2000 and to assess its impact on technology development. The narrative begins by describing the RD&D program of the EPA in the 1970s, which many observers deem to have been successful,...

Highly skilled people are among the most valuable factors of production in the contemporary world economy. Some have characterized the competition among nations for these people as a "brain drain" or "war for talent," which imposes significant costs on the countries of emigration. However, the distribution of costs and benefits that results from hi...

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Hong Kong’s recent economic history, viewed from a distance, is a success story. Most obviously, real per capita income has risen sixfold in less than 40 years (USDA, 2008). The region has maintained its economic momentum despite the enormous structural shift entailed by the rapid development since 1978 of Mainland China as a whole and of the Pearl...

This paper describes the development of the U.S. state of New Jersey’s policy to accelerate the growth of photovoltaic electricity generating capacity over the past ten years. It provides insights that may be of use to scholars and policy-makers who seek to understand how markets for photovoltaics and other renewable energy technologies may be crea...

In this study, we quantify the role of immigrants in high-tech entrepreneurship in the United States. We report the results of a survey of a nationally representative sample of rapidly growing high-impact, high-tech companies. This group of companies is very important to the U.S. economy, because they account for a disproportionate share of job cre...

This paper advances a friendly critique of the national systems of innovation approach and offers some suggestions for its future development. I argue that the approach has difficulty accounting for bounded change in national systems. I review three recent changes in the U.S. innovation system – the Internet boom and bust of the late 1990s and earl...

American LiberalismThe Constitutional SystemFederal PatronageLooking Forward

This paper describes the history, development, and current operation of USGBC and LEED, particularly with regard to energy efficiency in commercial buildings, the subsector in which LEED has had its greatest impact. The narrative situates "green building" in a political as well as a business context. While USGBC may well have been "the right idea a...

This paper analyzes Hong Kong’s talent pool. We describe stocks and flows of several key human resource indicators, both general and specialized to science and technology. We find that Hong Kong’s working population is acquiring the skills and knowledge required to support innovation fairly rapidly. We do not draw a conclusion as to whether the pac...

This paper describes the development of the U.S. state of New Jersey's policy to accelerate the growth of photovoltaic electricity generating capacity over the past ten years. It provides insights that may be of use to scholars and policy-makers who seek to understand how markets for photovoltaics and other renewable energy technologies may be crea...

Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy 2009 This presentation was part of the session : Globalization of Science and Innovation

In this study, we quantify the role of foreign-born founders in high-tech entrepreneurship in a nationally representative sample of rapidly growing "high-impact" companies. This class of companies drives job creation and aggregate growth in the U.S. We find that, while most previous studies have overstated this role, it is nonetheless very importan...

This article argues for balancing corporate personhood-or, more precisely, the unitary rational actor political theory of the firm, which predominates in the social science literature-with two other theories of the firm that have not yet been as fully developed. These alternatives treat the firm as a complex nexus of contracts among individual rati...

RudyAlan P.et alUniversities in the Age of Corporate Science: The UC Berkeley-Novartis Controversy. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2007. xiv + 236 pp. ISBN 1-59213-533-1, $54.50 (cloth). - Volume 9 Issue 2 - David M. Hart

"Entrepreneurial" economic development strategies at the state level in the United States, which focus on nurturing home-grown, high-growth businesses, lack immediate payoffs for politically powerful constituencies, a condition that would seem likely to limit their appeal compared to the alternative "locational" strategy of attracting large investm...

Globalization now extends beyond markets for goods and finance into markets for technology, knowledge workers, and innovation finance. This paper asserts the existence of a widening gap between the rapidly growing global knowledge economy and the woefully inadequate institutional framework that supports and regulates it. This gap threatens to under...

The emergence of a global knowledge economy means that globalization now extends beyond markets for goods and finance into markets for technology, knowledge workers, and innovation finance. An increasing division of labor in innovation has accelerated the creation of markets for disembodied intellectual assets and for the skills and money needed to...

This article describes the evolution of IBM's effort to manage its relationships with the U.S. government from the time that Thomas Watson, Jr. became CEO. While the Watson family controlled the firm, the family members served as the main bridges between IBM and the government. This personalized approach began to give way in the 1960s, as the inten...

This paper argues that the systems of innovation analytic framework affords valuable insights into the impact of highly-skilled immigrants on innovation processes in developed countries. The paper first reviews why highly-skilled migration has risen on the agenda of policy-makers and researchers and sets forth my interpretation of the systems of in...

This article describes the evolution of IBM's effort to manage its relationships with the U.S. government from the time that Thomas Watson, Jr. became CEO. While the Watson family controlled the firm, the family members served as the main bridges between IBM and the government. This personalized approach began to give way in the 1960s, as the inten...

Better management of the international migration of highly skilled people may provide a way to expand the global talent pool as well as to allow existing talent to be used more efficiently. After reviewing contemporary scholarship on the knowledge economy and on migration patterns, this paper considers three broad approaches to governance of migrat...

Migrants from all sources of countries face the prospect of a potent backlash within the receiving countries, added with anti-immigrant sentiment and concerns about the offshoring of jobs. Policymakers around the world should seize emerging opportunities to expand the mutual gains that might be made through high-skill migration. Policymakers need t...

DobbinFrank, ed. The New Economic Sociology: A Reader. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. vii + 565 pp. ISBN 0-691-04905-X, $65.00 (cloth); 0-691-04906-8, $27.95 (paper). - Volume 6 Issue 3 - David M. Hart

This article traces the political development of the Control Data Corporation (CDC) and its founder and chief executive officer, William C. Norris, from the firm’s formation in 1957 until his departure from its leadership in 1986. Norris was entrepreneurial in his political strategy, taking large risks to pursue what he perceived to be large opport...

This article traces the political development of the Control Data Corporation (CDC) and its founder and chief executive officer, William C. Norris, from the firm’s formation in 1957 until his departure from its leadership in 1986. Norris was entrepreneurial in his political strategy, taking large risks to pursue what he perceived to be large opport...

This book reveals how government and its allies (like business associations) can help people to start businesses that have the potential to grow rapidly and make major contributions to the economy. Although many entrepreneurs think of government as the enemy, and many policy-makers simply ignore entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs, this volum...