Inventing Prosperity: Science, Technology, and the Future of American Innovation

America's innovation advantage has historically rested on a balanced division of innovative labor among corporate labs, universities, startups, and government. In the mid-twentieth century, famed corporate laboratories—Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, DuPont Central Research—combined discovery and development under one roof, turning frontier science into world-changing innovations. Today, many of these labs have closed, downsized, or redirected toward more short-term applications, while universities and startups have taken their stead.

Inventing Prosperity explains how these structural shifts have affected the American innovation engine. In fields such as the life sciences, a deeper division of labor has accelerated discovery and commercialization by fostering specialization. In nanotechnology, new materials, and other "deep-tech" sectors, however, the results have been more disappointing. Drawing on a wealth of data linking patents, scientific papers, venture activity, and firm performance, the authors show that the chief bottleneck is not a shortage of breakthrough science or funding but a structural mismatch. Fixing this mismatch requires strengthening the connective tissue among the ecosystem's actors.

Blending economic history, case studies, and fresh policy analysis, this book provides a clear-eyed, data-driven guide to reigniting America's innovation. It calls for rebuilding translational capacity inside firms, forging smarter public-private partnerships, broadening innovation policy to include smart procurement, and experimenting with new types of research organizations, so that ideas can cross institutional borders at speed. In doing so, Inventing Prosperity shows how to convert twenty-first-century breakthroughs into broad-based growth.