Research – Deepak Hegde

Technological innovation drives human welfare (a picture is worth a thousand words–see Figure 1 of Robert Fogel’s “Catching up with the Economy“).  The private sector and the government in the U.S. alone collectively invest around $500 billion each year on technological innovation.  But only a fraction of these investments succeed. Motivated by the cost of these failures to society, my research studies how new science and technology are funded, and how innovators surmount the hurdles associated with commercializing new ideas. Theoretically, I focus on informational barriers to innovation, motivated by Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow’s insight that since the value of new ideas is not generally known, inventors have to lay bare their proprietary knowledge to convince others of their ideas’ value.  The ideas can be expropriated by others once revealed, thus hindering the disclosure of ideas to potential investors and partners, necessary for commercial success.  This unique property of ideas

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• Stella Jia