Technology, Innovations and Economic Development

K.J. Joseph is the Ministry of Commerce Chair Professor at Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum. He is also the Vice-President of Globelics and the Editor-in-Chief of Innovation and Development, published by Taylor and Francis. Professor Joseph also holds the position of expert in innovation studies in the Tianjin University of Finance and Economics appointed under the Tianjin Program of Recruitment of Global Experts. Earlier positions that he held include visiting senior fellow at Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), New Delhi, and visiting professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University and consultant to United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). As a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, he undertook research on technology licensing in India under the supervision of Robert Evenson at Yale University and published jointly with him. Apart from over 80 research papers, he has the following books to his credit: Industry under Economic Liberalization: The Case of Indian Electronics (Sage Publications); Information Technology, Innovation System and Trade Regime in Developing Countries: India and the ASEAN (Palgrave Macmillan); Export Competitiveness of Knowledge Intensive Industries, edited with Nagesh Kumar (Oxford University Press) and the Handbook on Innovation Systems in Developing Countries (Edward Elgar) edited with B.A. Lundvall, Cristina Chaminade and Jan Vang.

Daniel K.N. Johnson is the Chair of the Economics and Business Department at Colorado College, and a tenured Associate Professor of Economics. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University (1998), which he completed under Bob Evenson’s supervision. He previously completed an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics (1992) and a B.Soc.Sc. Honours from the University of Ottawa, Canada (1991). He is the author of over 50 refereed journal articles, commissioned pieces and book chapters. Several of those are co-authored with Bob Evenson, and he takes special pleasure in talking about those with students as models of collaboration. He frequently co-authors with his undergraduate students, inspired by Bob’s methodology. Specializing in the economics of innovation and technological change, he frequently advises and lectures internationally on public policy related to intellectual property rights. In addition to his primary research on knowledge spillovers, he enjoys writing projects that apply economic models to unusual questions: predicting Olympic medal counts, explaining game show contestant behaviour, evaluating the impact of Walmart on residential property values, exploring philanthropic behaviour patterns, improving the marginal impact of microfinance lending programmes, explaining the adoption of new election equipment in the wake of vote count scandals, analysing where consumers can find the cheapest gas and evaluating pedagogical techniques and outcomes in economics. Feeling that it was not enough to simply study innovation and entrepreneurship, he founded and now runs three start-up companies, all serving the interests of higher education: Economics of Technology Consulting, Lightning Abstracts and BookCheetah.