Press · September 11, 2024
What middle-income countries can learn from America's innovation system.
A Growth Academy research brief drawing three lessons from the U.S. innovation system, grounded in the World Development Report 2024.
Drawing on the World Development Report 2024, this brief sets out three lessons from the American innovation system that middle-income countries can adapt as they push toward high-income status.
First, think big: innovation today is driven less by lone inventors than by large, established firms, so policy has to help capable firms scale. Second, attract and nurture talent wherever it can be found; more than a third of U.S. growth between 1960 and 2010 has been attributed to falling racial and gender discrimination in education and the labor market, and technology sectors with a high concentration of immigrant inventors went on to grow faster for decades. Third, build a market for diffusing innovation, including the secondary markets for patents that let ideas spread beyond the firms that originate them.
The brief is candid that middle-income countries face tighter structural constraints than the United States did at comparable income levels, but argues that adapting these lessons to local circumstances is within reach.
