Is innovation always a good thing? It's a question I'm often asked, usually rhetorically. The speaker normally has one of two things in mind: innovations that are intended to do harm (cluster bombs, drone strikes) or innovations that go horribly wrong (credit default swaps, grey goo)*.
Martin Wolf wrote a widely quoted article in today's FT arguing that economic growth is slowing down in a long-term and structural way. There's a lot to say about this (I fundamentally disagree with the underlying paper by Robert Gordon that Wolf bases his paper on).
So the bank is out of the bag. Today at the Lib Dem party conference, Vince Cable announced the establishment of a state bank to get credit flowing to businesses. But as the last five years have taught us, there are all sorts of banks: good banks, bad banks, casino banks and zombie banks. Will this new bank be the right sort of bank, and will it help business to grow?
What if the problem with the economy is that good businesses can’t grow and bad businesses can’t shrink?
UK business investment in innovation looks to have fallen sharply since the 2008 financial crisis. More intriguingly, there are signs of a longer-standing investment problem that started long before 2008.
Or: How do you find the low-hanging fruit in an invisible orchard?
Industrial policy is back. Vince Cable, Britain's Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills is calling for a "proper industrial policy" to create "a different type of economy".
Venture capital has much to be proud of. In the past fifty years, it has helped build a host of great companies, from Intel and Genentech to Facebook and Google.
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