Innovate or Else: 6 Thinkers’ Ideas

Why are some nations richer than others? It comes down to productivity. The more output each worker can generate, the greater the wealth of a society and the faster the economy can grow. And key to productivity is innovation, the ability to generate new ideas—whether a new technology (the PC) or a new way of doing things (big-box retailing)—and use them wisely and widely in society.

"Innovation is the ultimate driver in the improvement of our standard of living by helping us create more value from the resources available to us," says innovation guru Paul Romer, an economics professor at Stanford University. "But it doesn’t happen all by itself. We have to encourage innovation and the economic exploitation of discoveries."

By James Pethokoukis

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