Ratio dialogue with Professor Jason Potts

What is good innovation policy? Ratio Dialogue with Professor Jason Potts (RMIT University) and Professor Nils Karlson (the Ratio Institute). Professor Potts is a renowned expert on innovation economics. He is the author of the upcoming book Innovation Commons (Oxford University Press, 2019). In February 2019 he visited the Ratio Institute as well as The Swedish Agency for Growth Policy Analysis for a discussion on innovation, growth and new technology. Among other things he presented a new foreword to a second edition of the Ratio report Innovationspolitik för tillväxt.

Potts argues that effective innovation policy should aim to enact broader reforms making it easier to run businesses. Innovation means doing new things, and reducing the costs of introducing new ideas, of starting new businesses, transferring capital assets into new purposes, finding and hiring new staff, and creating new business models. Fixing these problems is less about supporting innovators by pushing public resources to them, but rather about lowering costs and reducing barriers to doing these new things. The best innovation policy is a good business environment.

His foreword and the report can be downloaded here.

Professor Potts visit to Stockholm got covered by Dagens industri and Dagens samhälle.