Faculty Books

Accelerating Energy Innovation: Insights From Multiple Sectors
Edited by Rebecca Henderson and Richard G. Newell

From the author:
Re-orienting current energy systems toward a far greater reliance on technologies with low or no carbon dioxide emissions is one of the most critical challenges of our time, and doing it without substantial innovation is a dauntingly expensive proposition. We need to accelerate innovation in energy across the board and we need to do it as quickly as possible.

This book pulls together the histories of a number of industries where we have seen extraordinary rates of innovation in order to distill common factors that make such acceleration possible. In seven chapters, leading experts in the history of agriculture, chemicals, semiconductors, computers, the Internet, and biopharmaceuticals explore the complex role that public policy and private markets have played in triggering rapid innovation in the industry and sustaining it once in motion, focusing particularly on ways that the delicate balance between public funding and private markets was maintained productively for many years. Taken together, they offer a roadmap for the ways in which energy innovation policy can be shaped to be maximally effective over the coming decade.

Buy this book