Raymond A. Smith, Ph.D. is an adjunct assistant professor of political science at Columbia University and New York University and is author of Importing Democracy: Ideas from Around the World to Reform and Revitalize American Politics and Government and The American Anomaly: U.S. Politics and Government in Comparative Perspective.

Steven A. Nyce is the director of Towers Watson’s Corporate Research and Innovation (CRI) group in Arlington, Virginia. His research focuses on the U.S. health care market and the implications of recent plan design trends and workplace initiatives on employer’s costs and utilization of health services.

Kevin Makinson is a Ph.D. Candidate at Oregon State University in radiation health physics. His research focuses on developing new methods for severe accident risk communication to senior operations staff in nuclear power plants.

PPI Chief Economic Strategist Michael Mandel’s new report on scale and innovation is featured in this week’s Economist‘s Schumpeter column:

SOME people say it is neither big nor clever to drink. Viz, a British comic, settled that debate with a letter from a reader who said: “I drink 15 pints a day, I’m 6 foot 3 inches tall and a professor of theoretical physics.” However, another question about size and cleverness has yet to be resolved. Are big companies the best catalysts of innovation, or are small ones better?

Joseph Schumpeter, after whom this column is named, argued both sides of the case. In 1909 he said that small companies were more inventive. In 1942 he reversed himself. Big firms have more incentive to invest in new products, he decided, because they can sell them to more people and reap greater rewards more quickly. In a competitive market, inventions are quickly imitated, so a small inventor’s investment often fails to pay off.

These days the second Schumpeter is out of fashion: people assume that little start-ups are creative and big firms are slow and bureaucratic. But that is a gross oversimplification, says Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. In a new report on “scale and innovation”, he concludes that today’s economy favours big companies over small ones. Big is back, as this newspaper has argued. And big is clever, for three reasons.

Read it at The Economist.

Download Mandel’s report – Scale and Innovation in Today’s Economy.

PPI President Will Marshall offers his thoughts on the most important policy innovation in 2011 to Politico’s Arena:

“Michael Mandel, PPI’s chief economic strategist, has proposed a creative fix: a Regulatory Improvement Commission (RIC) modeled on the BRAC Commissions for evaluating military base closures. The RIC will take a principled approach to evaluating and pruning existing regulations, gather input from all stakeholders (not just business or just agencies) and do so in a manner that ensures we protect public health, safety and the environment.”

Read the full post here.

Diana G. Carew is an economist at the Progressive Policy Institute. Prior to joining PPI, she served as a policy analyst at the Export-Import Bank of the U.S., where she analyzed the relationship between exports and U.S. jobs. Previously, Carew was an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics where she worked on U.S. employment [...]

Date
October 6, 2011
10 a.m. – 1 p.m.

Location
902 Hart Senate Office Building
U.S. Capitol Complex
Washington, DC 20501

Join PPI and top leaders from the White House, Congress, private industry, labor, and the financial sector to discuss current issues in U.S. infrastructure policy. White House economist Gene Sperling will explain the administration’s proposals for new infrastructure investment and their potential impact on the economy. Senator John Kerry and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro will describe their proposals to create a national infrastructure bank to improve infrastructure spending decisions and maintain U.S. competitiveness in the global economy, and private-sector leaders will explain how infrastructure projects will create jobs and mobilize private capital to boost economic growth and investment.

Register for the event.

Erik Adamiec is a research assistant at the Progressive Policy Institute.

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University.  He is a member of the National Academy of Education.

Michael Levine is the founding director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, an action research and innovation hub devoted to harnessing the potential of digital media to advance young children’s learning and healthy development.

Laura Cunliffe is an education policy analyst at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Jason Gold is the director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s “Rethinking U.S. Housing Policy Project” and senior fellow for financial services policy. Gold joins PPI from Third Way, where he was a senior fellow for housing and financial services policy. A 17-year industry veteran, Gold’s work will focus on the intersection of housing policy and [...]

Shannon Leon is a fiscal policy analyst at the Progressive Policy Institute and a Peter G. Peterson Foundation fiscal intern.

Sylvester J. Schieber is the former chair of the Social Security Advisory Board.

Anne Kim is the managing director for policy and strategy at the Progressive Policy Institute. Previously, she worked for five years as the director of the economic and domestic policy programs at Third Way. She has also served as deputy chief of staff and legislative director to Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), as a senior fellow [...]

Anonymous PPI author

Our top five reads of the day:

• Bradford Plumer reflects on our outsized fear of nuclear catastrophe: “The best thing the nuclear industry can do to combat atomic dread is to avoid any mishaps in the first place. And the industry has done well on this front. But unexpected events—a 9.0-magnitude earthquake, say—do have a way of creeping along eventually. And, fair or not, accidents involving nuclear power will likely always be held to a higher standard.”
• Ron Brownstein explains why Americans long for their own homes: “For all the differences over public policy, the survey’s most powerful message remains the personal appeal of homeownership. Americans see it as a good investment, a source of stability in their financial lives, and a milestone in their progression into adulthood.”
• John Avlon looks at how Sarah Palin has gone from the most divisive figure in politics to the most polarizing within the GOP: “It’s tempting to say that if Sarah Palin planned to side-step a 2012 presidential campaign all along, she has played her hand well. But the truth is that she has emerged from the past two and a half years considerably diminished.”
• Bruce Bartlett explores the intersection of politics and economic protectionism: “for a politician, supporting protectionism is always the popular approach with voters. For as far back as we can gauge opinion on this subject, the general public has always supported measures to restrict imports and protect jobs, and opposed free trade.”
• Marc Lynch questions the international community’s gamble in Libya: “One might think that the disastrous post-war trajectories of Iraq and Afghanistan would have forever ended such an approach to military interventions, but here we are. Has anyone really seriously thought through the role the U.S. or international community might be expected to play should Qaddafi fall? Or what steps will follow should the No Fly Zone and indirect intervention not succeed in driving Qaddafi from power? No, there’s no time for that… there never is.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Not all charter schools are good, but the best charters are providing high-quality education to disadvantaged children. The problem, according to a new study by the Progressive Policy Institute, is that America’s high-performing charter networks aren’t growing fast enough to meet public demand. In Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best, researchers [...]

Our top five reads of the day:

• Ron Brownstein points to Obama’s State of the Union address as a reality shift from acting as a prime minister to acting as a president: “Just as important, Obama’s emphasis on competitiveness reframes the nature of his leadership. It repositions him from leading one party into battle against the other to leading the entire nation into economic competition against foreign challengers.”
• Michael Bloomberg tells the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that “What we need is a new approach to spending transportation money – one that’s not dictated by politics, but based on economics. We might not get all the routes we want, but we will get the high-speed trains we need.”
• Terryn Norris calls Obama’s speech a major realignment that signals not only a change for energy policy, but “the rise of a new national economic strategy based on ‘innovation economics.’”
• Shadi Hamid urges the U.S. to offer bold support for democracy in the Arab world: “With the upsurge in popular, possibly revolutionary anger in the Middle East, this is the time to reconsider failed approaches and advance a bold policy supporting the political changes already well underway.”
• Joe Klein explains how Obama’s State of the Union helped redefine the Democratic party for the 21st century: “Obama completely reversed the American political calculus of the 1980s and ’90s. He made the Democrats the party of optimism and the Republicans the party of root canal.”

Andrew Albertson is the former executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy and a fellow at the Truman National Security Project.