It is widely presumed that agglomeration effects cause large cities to have large advantages in the innovative process. A new study tests this presumption by examining the proportion of patents filed in large metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2014 across 14 OECD countries.
Global
March 23, 2020
Demand for H-1B visas, which allow U.S. firms to recruit high-skilled foreign workers, has dramatically exceeded the supply—there were 200,000 applications in 2019 for the 85,000 visas that were available.
February 24, 2020
Working together, firms from different parts of the digital economy can disrupt the supply side of the digital piracy equation to make it harder and costlier for illicit operators to function.
January 27, 2020
Countries that value an open, competitive digital economy should use surveys to improve quantitative analysis of cross-border data flows, because policymakers can’t effectively manage and address barriers to digital trade unless they can measure it.
December 16, 2019
Prior to last week’s progress toward an interim trade deal with China, the United States had repeatedly delayed the expansion of tariffs on Chinese goods to most finished products. This was out of concern that such an escalation would hit U.S. consumers harder than existing tariffs on the intermediate goods that serve as inputs for companies to make their final products.
November 18, 2019
The Global Mercantilist Index, ranking 60 nations on 18 variables ranging from market access and forced localization to currency manipulation and intellectual property protections, finds that China is the world’s most innovation-mercantilist nation.
November 15, 2019
The Non-GMO Project label is now misleading consumers on more than 60,000 food items in U.S. grocery stores. Val Giddings tells the Food & Drug Law Institute it's time for FDA to enforce the law and puit an end to this illegal practice.
September 23, 2019
Despite concern over climate change, global carbon emissions continue to rise. Clean energy innovation is needed to reverse the trend. It is time for Mission Innovation member nations to make good on their commitment to double clean energy RD&D.
September 16, 2019
The rise of the Internet has allowed billions of people to access services that would not exist otherwise, while driving the growth of technologies that power them. A new study has attempted to quantify this effect, examining the rate of Internet usage across 76 countries between 1995 and 2016.
August 26, 2019
Since 2015, 24 nations and the EU have joined “Mission Innovation,” pledging to double public investments in energy RD&D and collaborate on key innovation challenges. This report seeks to provide accountability for these commitments and lay the foundation for more ambitious measures.
August 19, 2019
When skilled migrants come to a new country, they bring both expertise in their fields and connections to experts in their home countries, increasing the likelihood that they will produce new inventions in the fields in which their home countries excel. New research has provided the broadest estimation of this effect, examining immigration between 135 countries and patents in 651 technological categories from 1990 to 2010.
June 17, 2019
Student mobility has increased dramatically in recent years with 4.1 million students studying internationally in 2015, more than triple the 1.3 million international students in 1999. New research shows that these students are now far less concentrated in developed nations.
June 14, 2019
The Indian Government has lagged in approving safe biotech improved crops for years while farmers around the world have been reaping the rewards. Indian farmers are "not gonna take it anymore..."
May 27, 2019
The foundation of the global digital economy is showing cracks. Countries that support an open, rules-based global trading system need to agree on a common framework.
April 1, 2019
To maximize the economic and societal benefits of data and digital technologies, policymakers should resist the “data localization” trap and focus instead on the fundamentals of ICT adoption.
March 14, 2019
Val Giddings' presentation on a panel at the Society for Benefit Cost Analysis meeting argues that regulatory disincentives to innovation in agricultural biotechnology can be reduced by a return to fundamental principals of risk assessment and management, as longstanding U.S. Policy requires.
January 28, 2019
From a skewed standardization law in China to mercantilist digital services tax proposals in Europe, when countries impose protectionist policies in high-value, high-tech sectors, they don’t just damage competitors; they damage the entire global innovation system.
January 16, 2019
If countries do not show proper restraint, they can easily sabotage the global Internet by imposing unreasonable obligations on companies and setting up scenarios where companies are forced into a no-win situation of having to comply with conflicting laws.
January 7, 2019
A brief recap of some of the biggest developments and surprises in agricultural biotechnology innovation in 2018.
January 7, 2019
The next wave of digital innovation is coming. Countries can welcome it, prepare for it, and ride it to new heights of innovation and prosperity, or they can ignore the changing tide and miss the wave.
December 6, 2018
Rob Atkinson spoke on a panel at the 2018 G7 Multistakeholder Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Montréal, Canada.
November 26, 2018
There are nearly 6,000 firms with revenues exceeding $1 billion, representing nearly two-thirds of global corporate earnings. The 10 percent of those firms with the largest profits produce 80 percent of the group’s total earnings. A new study has found that firms in the top 1 percent outperform the median firm across the board, with 20 times more revenue, 12 times more employees, 2.9 times more R&D intensity, 23 percent more labor productivity, and 14 percent more fixed capital productivity.
September 28, 2018
Gene editing is a process of making precise changes to an organism’s DNA in a manner analogous to the way we change the text of a document with word processing software.
September 24, 2018
The Non-GMO Project food label deliberately deceives and misleads consumers in violation of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. ITIF petitions FDA to prohibit such labels.
July 3, 2018
ITIF submitted comments to the USDA Agriculture Marketing Service's proposed regulations to implement the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard, aka "GMO" labeling.