New Thinking in Industrial, Innovation & Technology Policy: Perspectives from Developed & Developing Countries

After many years in the wilderness, industrial policy -- government interventions to stimulate innovation, accelerate technological change, and promote selected industries – is back on mainstream policy agendas in the U.S., Europe, and many developing countries. But even as the policy pendulum swings back toward government intervention, the knowledge base to guide industrial policy remains underdeveloped. This conference will convene leading researchers from economics, sociology, engineering and other fields to take stock of what is known and what needs to be learned about the optimal design of interventions, the challenges in evaluating interventions empirically, and the difficulties that practitioners face on the ground.

Keynote 1: Michael Kremer, University Professor, Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, University of Chicago, and 2019 Nobel Laureate

Keynote 2: Erica Fuchs, Professor, Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie-Mellon University, and Director of the National Network for Critical Technology Assessment

The Center for Political Economy (CPE) at Columbia World Projects, the Center for Development Economics and Policy (CDEP), and the Tech & Innovation Initiative at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University will host the conference on Nov. 10, 2023. A conference dinner will precede the event on Nov. 9. The event will take place in-person at Columbia.

The program is here.

The academic committee for the event is: Laura Boudreau (Columbia Business School), Andrew Schrank (Brown University, International and Public Affairs), Eric
Verhoogen (Columbia University, Economics and SIPA), and Josh Whitford (Columbia University, Sociology).

The conference will cover two nights' hotel accommodation and reasonable travel costs (economy class for flights) for speakers and will consider requests for travel funding from other attendees on a case-by-case basis.

Please register to attend in person.

If you are not able to attend in person, there will be a livestream of the conference at this link: https://youtube.com/live/irrg3G_jYiA?feature=share. Video of the presentations will also be available after the conference.

If you have questions, please contact Olena Jennings of CDEP at [email protected].

Post-conference update: The talks and the turnout (standing room only) were great. Links to videos of the talks (unfortunately only a subset) are here. Stay tuned for next year!