Episode 52: Industrial Policy and the Entrepreneurial State – Facts and Fiction with Karl Wennberg

In the past decades, there has been a flurry of initiatives by governments to support strategic technologies and innovation. For some, the industrial history of the West is full of examples of governments creating business success by hands-on innovation policies and industrial investments – and that sentiment is now propping up new plans in Brussels and Washington for industrial policies. But is this account of economic history and policy success true? What do we know from research about the effectiveness of innovation and industrial policies? What can governments do to create better conditions for innovation-led growth?

In this episode, Fredrik Erixon and Karl Wennberg discuss about industrial policy and innovation.

Professor Karl Wennberg is an expert on the economics of innovation. He’s a professor of organization and entrepreneurship, and soon takes up the Barbara Bergstrom Chair in Educational Leadership and Excellence at the Stockholm School of Economics. He is the co-author of Knowledge Intensive Entrepreneurship – The Birth, Growth and Demise of Entrepreneurial Firms and a recent study on Bureaucrats and Markets in Innovation Policy.

This episode was recorded as a live webinar. Click here to watch this conversation on YouTube.