It was heartening to read Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent Lord Banquet Speech about the need to better prepare Great Britain for the global economic race. The prime minister articulated the need for a comprehensive plan of reforms to enhance innovation and improve Britain’s industrial competitiveness. It shows that, unlike America, Britain is recognizing the broader systemic causes of the global recession and moving past old ideas and theories that do not match our current reality.

Stephen Ezell, author of Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage, will host a reception with the Policy Exchange in London on January 15, 2013. 

Stephen Ezell, a Senior Analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), focuses on innovation policy, science and technology policy, international competitiveness, and trade, manufacturing, and services issues.

Innovation Economics explains that today, economic growth hinges on the ability to innovate. While the U.S. has watched its manufacturing sector decline at a rate faster than during the Great Depression, shifted its R&D overseas, and squandered its ample resources on risky speculation, scores of nations have done the opposite and made investment in innovation a top priority.

Stephen will take this opportunity to lead the discussion on lessons learnt from both the US and UK’s industrial decline. The similarities in the nature and causes of the decline experienced by both the United States and the United Kingdom are truly striking. Both nations failed to enact the right innovation-supporting policies, and both have paid the price with industrial decline. Remarkably, virtually all the factors that historians and economists attribute to the causes of British industrial decline almost exactly match the U.S. experience.

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