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Green growth promises to transform climate change mitigation from a problem to an economic sure thing. By making investment in energy efficiency and low-emissions energy the foundation of a new industrial revolution, green growth promises to relieve the intractable conflict between high-carbon losers and low-carbon winners. This book addresses the challenges and opportunities for green growth. Advocates for green growth have yet to show how investments in emissions reduction translate into improvements in economic productivity. As the first half of this book illustrates, most green growth successes so far face limits to their ability to generate sustained economic improvement. We propose that real green growth must focus on how a low-carbon energy systems transformation will create growth in the broader economy. Previous transformations, in coal, oil, or electricity, drove growth primarily via the new kinds of production they made possible in the economy writ large. Whether low-carbon energy may do the same remains unclear. The second half addresses how we might discover these transformative gains. We introduce the idea of a “green spiral”, in which early policy action creates supportive constituencies with an economic stake in further progress towards a low-emissions energy system. Country case studies illustrate the potential for this feedback loop to operate in different national contexts. With this action occurring despite little progress on a global climate deal, we conclude that an international climate change treaty may be the product, not the start, of effective national action on emissions reduction.

This book traces the emergence and growth of the Israeli hi-tech sector to provide a new understanding of industry evolution. In the case of Israel, the chapters here reveal how the hi-tech sector built an entrepreneurial culture with a capacity to disseminate intergenerational knowledge of how to found new ventures, as well as an intricate network of support for new firms. Following the evolution of this industry from embryonic to mature, the chapters develop a genealogical approach that relies on looking at the sector in the way that one might consider a family tree. The principles of this genealogical analysis enable them to draw attention to the dynamics of industry evolution, while relating the effects of the parent companies' initial conditions to their respective corporate genealogies and imprinting potential. The text suggests that genealogical evolution is a key mechanism for understanding the rate and extent of founding new organizations, comparable to factors such as opportunity structures, capabilities, and geographic clusters.

The Fountain of Knowledge analyzes two world-renowned universities, their investment in technology commercialization, and the outcome of this contribution in their local economies. This book has three main arguments. First, the way in which a university goes about improving its technology-transfer capability matters. Conducting a focused and thoughtful comprehensive change that includes all sections of the university will improve commercialization. Second, by choosing a particular path of change, the university also changes its role and its ability to contribute to the region. Third, not all changes will positively affect the local economy.

This book uses telecommunications policy as a window to examine major contradictions in China's growth as an economic and political superpower. While China policy analysts wonder why the government occasionally restrains growth and raises prices, technologists marvel at how the telecommunications industry continues to grow enormously despite constraints and unpredictability in the market. Frustration is pervasive in the business environment, where regulations are constantly changing. This book provides six policy-focused case studies, each centered on a question with implications for telecom stakeholders, such as: Who is the regulator? Who are the regulated? Which foreigners can enter China, thereby regulating wholesale prices, setting consumer prices, and introducing Internet and innovative technologies? These cases explain the government's liberal and conservative approach toward reform, the policies that both promote and constrain business, and the major hurdles that lie ahead in telecommunications reform.

In 1970, the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco had almost identical levels of income per resident. In 2010, the San Francisco Bay Area was almost one third richer than Los Angeles, which had slipped from 4th rank among cities in the United States to 25th. The usual reasons for explaining such change—good or bad luck, different types of immigrants, tax rates, housing costs, and local economic policies, the pool of skilled labor—do not account for why they perform so differently. Instead, the divergence in economic development of major city regions is largely due to the different capacities for organizational change in their firms, networks of people, and networks of leaders. Drawing on economics, sociology, political science, and geography, this book sheds new light on the deep causes of economic development and challenges many conventional notions about it. By studying two regions in unprecedented levels of depth and precision, it develops lessons for the field of economic development studies in general and for urban regions around the world.

This book explores why new industries emerge at specific moments in time and in certain countries. Part I shows that technologies which experience “exponential” improvements in cost and performance have a greater chance of becoming new industries. When “low-end” discontinuities incur exponential improvements, they often displace the dominant technologies and become “disruptive” innovations. Part II explores this phenomenon and instances in which discontinuities spawn new industries because they impact higher-level systems. Part III addresses a different set of questions—ones that consider the challenges of new industries for firms and governments. Part IV uses ideas from the previous chapters to analyze the present and future of selected technologies. Based on analyses of many industries, including those with an electronic and clean energy focus, the book challenges the conventional wisdom that performance dramatically rises following the emergence of a new technology, that costs fall due to increases in cumulative production, and that low-end innovations automatically become disruptive ones.