What’s smart. Partnership, breakthroughs, a fresh look at expertise.
We are all looking for light these days. How fortunate we are to have the tools to find and share information that propels us to new levels of thought and action. In a renaissance, a society converts distress into progress.
A smarter way to think about public–private partnerships
www.mckinsey.com
All too often, however, these initiatives fail to find the optimum level of private-sector participation and, as a result, face the same challenges of traditionally procured public projects — cost overruns, delays, and increased complexity. What goes wrong? A central challenge is that governments may not fully capitalize on the true advantage of involving private-sector stakeholders: their ability to assess, price, and manage certain types of risk. PPPs that do not transfer risk — and benefit from the private-sector’s risk-management capabilities — will likely fall short of expectations.
The long story of industrial innovation — www.aeaweb.org
In a paper in the American Economic Review: Insights, authors Bryan Kelly, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Amit Seru, and Matt Taddy develop a new approach to identifying technological breakthroughs… Rather than relying on citations, they use natural language processing techniques to detect textual connections among patents. They then identify an important patent — or breakthrough innovation — as one that is distinct from prior patents (indicating a new idea) but similar to subsequent patents (signifying its influence on later innovation).
21 Experts on the Future of Expertise — future.a16z.com
…how is expertise being redefined in the modern era? We posed that question to 20+ experts. The line-up includes those that society might traditionally categorize as such — academics, scientists, researchers — as well as authorities in their own domains: a sci-fi novelist, an award-winning illustrator, gamers, prominent and emerging newsletter writers, and startup builders. Their answers are far from unequivocal, but do provide insights across education, science funding, healthcare, and more.
