UNECE

As the complexities of modern economies grow, traditional approaches to industrial policy face increasing scrutiny. For decades, debates have raged about how governments can intervene to foster innovation, address market failures, and create sustainable development paths. Today, industrial policy has undergone a transformation, and now embraces elements of market liberalism. In this episode of Innovation Matters, Professor Michael Munger from Duke University explores these issues, suggesting that industrial policy often oscillates between two extremes: setting the foundational rules of the game for markets to thrive and directly managing industry outcomes through subsidies, regulations, or nationalization. He highlights the inherent tensions in these approaches, including the risks of rent-seeking, misaligned incentives, and the difficulty of predicting which innovations will succeed.

As the pace of technological change accelerates, the limitations of our existing legal systems are becoming increasingly apparent. Traditional frameworks, designed for a slower and less complex world, struggle to keep up with the challenges posed by globalization, digitalization, and emerging technologies. There is a growing need for innovative approaches to lawmaking that can support both the rapid pace of innovation and the protection of societal values. In this episode, Profesor Gillian Hadfield from the University of Toronto discusses the importance of reimagining legal infrastructure to better align with the demands of our rapidly changing world.

UNECE explores issues around sustainable resource management and intergenerational equity with Jodi-Ann Wang, Grantham Research Institute, London School of Economics (LSE), member of UNECE's Resource Management Young Member Group (RMYMG).

In this episode of Innovation Matters, Professor Gillian Hadfield from the University of Toronto, discusses the importance of reimagining legal infrastructure to better align with the demands of our rapidly changing world. She explores the concept of using market mechanisms to drive legal innovation, emphasizing how regulatory markets can help create more responsive and effective legal systems.

In this episode of Innovation Matters, Professor Chris Berg, an economist at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, explores the concept of blockchain as a decentralized database, emphasizing its potential to transform global trade, social media, and even the integration of AI technologies. He delves into current challenges, such as regulatory uncertainties and the complexities of building decentralized networks, while maintaining an optimistic view of the future of the blockchain economy.

From the industrial revolution to the digital era, innovation has redefined economies and societies, offering new opportunities and challenges. However, balancing the promotion of innovation with the need for responsible oversight remains a key issue for governments, businesses, and communities. In this episode of Innovation Matters, Arthur Diamond, Professor of Economics at the University of Nebraska Omaha, shares his insights on innovative dynamism — where technological advancements drive significant transformation. We explore the historical evolution of innovation, comparing the more open, dynamic environment of the 19th century with the increasing role of state-led regulation that emerged in the 20th century, particularly after World War II. The discussion examines how regulation and central planning have influenced innovation, the lessons learned from technological breakthroughs, and how societies can find the right balance between encouraging innovation and ensuring responsible governance.

This episode of Innovation Matters explores with Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity how innovation has helped to expand the resource base and improve living standards, even as the global population has grown. The discussion highlights historical and contemporary examples of how innovation can increase resource efficiency and availability, providing an optimistic view of our future and the role of technology in addressing today’s challenges. It also delves into the broader implications for sustainability and future development.

We often see innovation as a linear process – from basic research over invention to innovation. But is that how knowledge develops and how innovation works? Could the concept of evolution help elucidate the dynamics better? How would such a perspective explain how knowledge evolves into, adapts to, and underpins societal and economic transformation? And what does that mean in practice, for entrepreneurship, policy, and how society works? Innovation Matters explores these questions with Prof. Jason Potts of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, who explains the importance of understanding the evolutionary nature of knowledge and how this perspective can inform policies that support more experimentation and learning.

In the past two decades, Open Innovation and its relatives, such as Open Science, have come to the fore as a paradigm contrasting with the view of innovation as something emerging from within firms. Referring to the practice of sourcing ideas from external sources and sharing valuable information widely, Open Innovation is essential to the creation of a broader innovation commons and to understanding a range of emergent phenomena that turn the traditional view on its head. As Prof. Henry Chesbrough, Berg Professor of Open Innovation and Sustainability at LUISS University of Rome, explains in Innovation Matters, this potential is set to continue growing, as we learn more and more about how to make better use of digital and frontier technologies.

Innovation has created huge wealth and opportunities over the past two centuries, and since the mid-20th century in particular. But over the past decades, many point to stagnating productivity. That makes it all the more important to aim for a fundamental reconceptualization and rebirth of innovation for the future. In this episode, Prof. Alex Tabarrok argues that by embracing a culture of growth and significantly reforming education, intellectual property laws, and bureaucratic regulations, societies can reignite the kind of innovation that drives substantial economic advances and improves the standard of living worldwide. Prof. Alex Tabarrok holds the Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

In this episode of Innovation Matters, we delve into the complex interplay between government policies, market dynamics, and transformative innovation with Dr. Anders Kärnä. As we navigate through the nuances of economic development and public policy, Dr. Kärnä offers a critical analysis on how governments can either foster or hinder innovation through industrial policies. Drawing from historical examples and current economic theories, this episode explores the delicate balance between governmental intervention and market freedom that underpins successful innovation ecosystems worldwide.

Sustainability is a pressing concern in the fashion and textile industry. In this episode of “The UN Forest Podcast”, host Samata Pattinson is joined by Åsa Degerman, Ben Selby and Carlo Covini to discuss the transformative role of forests and new technologies in making fashion more sustainable and circular. ------------------------------------------------------------------ About the UN Forest Podcast The UN Forest Podcast is a series produced by the Joint UNECE/FAO Forestry and Timber Section to showcase that the potential of forests goes beyond trees. Each episode features special guests and speakers who bring insights on forests as our strongest allies in fighting climate change and creating a sustainable future now and for generations to come. The views expressed in this episode are those of the individuals involved and should not be interpreted as endorsements by the United Nations, its affiliated organizations, its officials or Member States. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Credits: Samata Pattinson, CEO of BLACK PEARL Åsa Degerman, Project Manager at OnceMore® Ben Selby, CFO and Deputy CEO of Spinnova Carlo Covini, Project Manager Marketing Textiles at Lenzing Nicola Sangs, Editor and Producer Paola Deda, Director, Forests, Land and Housing Division of UNECE Audio credits: “vintage jingle” Licensor: SETUNIMAN Link & creative commons license details: https://freesound.org/s/156019/ “Atmo – Noise” Licensor: SIMBERTOB Link & creative commons license details: https://freesound.org/people/SimbertoB/sounds/186597/ “Chill Background Music” Licensor: ZHRØ Link & creative commons license details: https://freesound.org/people/ZHR%C3%98/sounds/584430/ “Chill Background Music” Licensor: Seth_Makes_Sounds Link & creative commons license details: https://freesound.org/people/Seth_Makes_Sounds/sounds/670039/

In this episode of Innovation Matters, we delve into the relationship between capitalism, innovation, and societal progress with Dr. Rainer Zitelmann. Through a historical lens and contemporary examples, this episode explores how capitalist dynamics have fostered technological breakthroughs, economic development, and contributed to improved standards of living for billions globally.

In this episode, we delve into the question of why certain countries excel in innovation while others, with similar resources, do not achieve the same level of success. In conversation with Dr. Mark Zachary Taylor of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Innovation Matters sheds light on the complex factors beyond institutions and policies that drive national innovation strategies.

In the previous episode of Innovation Matters on the industrial revolution with Professor Emma Griffin, we explored how innovative dynamism changed our word radically in a process still going on today. This second episode explores what life was like for the working class. Often maligned as squalid and dehumanizing, Emma Griffin delves into a range of autobiographies telling a different, much more nuanced story of optimism, perspectives, and dynamism.

In the mid-18th Century, the modern economy started to take shape. While limited to the invention of the factory system and the boom in the textile sector for the first decades, the Industrial Revolution brought unprecedented social and economic changes. Marking, in the words of prominent historian Eric Hobsbawn, “the most fundamental transformation of human life in the history of the world”, the innovative dynamism and legacy the industrial revolution created is alive and well today. In this episode of Innovation Matters, Professor Emma Griffin explains what prompted and upheld the industrial revolution and the innovative dynamism it paved the way for – and what we can learn from history on how to sustain innovative dynamism today and in the future. Emma Griffin is professor of modern British history at the University of East Anglia and President of the Royal Historical Society.

In this episode of Innovation Matters, we expand on the previous conversation with Adam Thierer, Senior Research Fellow with the R. Street Institute’s technology and innovation team, about the present and future of regulation in an era of unprecedented innovation. In Part 2, our focus is on the contemporary landscape of legislation, and the balance between permissionless innovation and effective governance. As the pace of technological advancement accelerates, we explore the challenge of reconciling rapid change with the traditional pace of legislation, particularly in the context of digitization.

Scientific and technological innovations frequently put the spotlight on the laws that govern them. In this episode of Innovation Matters, Professor Robin Feldman explains why the protection of invention arrangements can cause trouble and, in many ways, end up acting as a disincentive to innovation. The very nature of inventions makes them impossible to describe unambiguously for all time. When something is so new that we do not understand yet how it works, what it can do, or how it could be applied - as is often the case in biotechnology - description is necessarily slippery. Instead of hoping for clear boundaries, Professor Robin Feldman urges lawmakers to focus on what the law can do well: craft rules that anticipate the bargaining that will occur as rights unfold.

In this episode of Innovation Matters, we explore the intricate dynamics of regulation and innovation with Adam Thierer, Senior Research Fellow with the R. Street Institute’s technology and innovation team. He discusses the evolution of 'permissionless innovation' and its influence on past, present, and future technological progress. Drawing insights from his book "Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom", we embark on a journey to understand how various advancements have flourished without restrictions and impacted the technologies we rely on today.

In this episode, Innovation Matters discusses how converging technologies are transforming business, industries, and our lives, with award-winning journalist, entrepreneur, and Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, Steven Kotler. Our exploration takes us into the heart of how technologies could reshape our lives fundamentally and drive societal and economic transformative innovation.