Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy

The innovation economy begins with discovery and culminates in speculation. Over some 250 years, economic growth has been driven by successive processes of trial and error: upstream exercises in research and invention and downstream experiments in exploiting the new economic space opened by innovation. Drawing on his professional experiences, William H. Janeway provides an accessible pathway for readers to appreciate the dynamics of the innovation economy. He combines personal reflections from a career spanning forty years in venture capital, with the development of an original theory of the role of asset bubbles in financing technological innovation and of the role of the state in playing an enabling role in the innovation process. Today, with the state frozen as an economic actor and access to the public equity markets only open to a minority, the innovation economy is stalled; learning the lessons from this book will contribute to its renewal.

William H. Janeway has been an active venture capital investor for forty years. In particular, he built and led the Warburg Pincus Technology Investment team that provided the financial backing to a series of companies which made critical contributions to building the internet economy. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge, where he founded the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance, and is a Teaching Visitor in the Princeton University Economics Department. He is a member of the Board of the Social Science Research Council and of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. In September 2012 he was granted the honorary honour of Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by HM the Queen 'for services to education in support of Cambridge University and to UK/US relations'.