A Calculation of the Social Returns to Innovation

What are the social returns to investments in innovation? The disparate spillovers associated with innovation, including imitation, business stealing, and intertemporal spillovers, have made calculations of the social returns difficult. Northwestern Kellogg School of Management’s Benjamin F. Jones will provide an economy-wide calculation that nets out the many spillover margins. He will assess the role of capital investment, diffusion delays, learning-by-doing, productivity mismeasurement, health outcomes, and international spillovers in assessing the average social returns. Overall, estimates suggest that the social returns are very large. Even under conservative assumptions, innovation efforts produce social benefits that are many multiples of the investment costs.

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Managing Product Design & Development

3-Day Certificate Program

Gain the skills to manage the design and development of products for strategic competitive advantage. This intensive three-day certificate program provides the skills related to managing creativity and design, customer-focused innovation, gap analysis in the design process, strategy in design, industrial design essentials, human factors, research, marketing and intellectual property. Participants will also gain skills in managing the product development phase-gate process, teams, and product performance metrics.

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Healthcare innovation has taken off despite — and because of — the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Join us as US business editor for The Economist and Visiting Farley Fellow Vijay Vaitheeswaran moderates a panel discussing the latest advances in the field and how the very process of innovation is being reinvented right now. We’ll cover topics in digital health, including telemedicine, "quantified self" devices, consumer empowerment through smart apps, and back-office automation using robotic process automation and AI. We’ll also explore how the pandemic has led to an evolution in process such as open innovation in pharmaceuticals, an industry which has traditionally been secretive about research and development.

Moderator
Vijay Vaitheeswaran
US business editor for The Economist; Visiting Farley Fellow

Panelists

Vivian Lee
Author of The Long Fix: Solving America’s Health Care Crisis; President of Health Platforms at Verily Life Sciences (Alphabet); and senior lecturer at Harvard

Milton Morris
Kellogg MBA '04, President & CEO at NeuSpera Medical

John Rogers
Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Neurological Surgery (and by courtesy Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Chemistry)

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