Book & podcast collection

Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets Speculation and the State

byBill Janeway

Venture capitalist and economist Bill Janeway explains innovation as the product of a three-way relationship among markets, speculative finance, and the state. Breakthrough technologies often require long periods of uncertain investment that conventional business analysis cannot justify, while public funding builds the scientific and physical foundations private firms later commercialize. Janeway uses historical episodes and his own experience to show why bubbles can finance useful infrastructure even as they destroy capital. The book rejects simple stories of either heroic entrepreneurs or government planning, presenting technological progress as an unstable but productive collaboration among institutions with different tolerances for risk.

Publisher

University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations

Publication date

2012

Format

Print edition

Pages

345

ISBN

9781107031258