Inventions, such as new tools, devices, processes, and medicines, have provided significant benefits to society. Inventions help people around the world live longer, healthier, and more-productive lives and provide new ways to build, move, communicate, heal, learn, and play. Understanding and clearly communicating the value of invention can help policymakers appreciate the benefits of supporting the development of inventions and of addressing inequities that suppress the development of female and minority inventors. In this report, researchers use the inventions of Lemelson-MIT Prize winners as examples to illustrate the scientific, technological, economic, and social impacts that inventions can have on society. The impacts of this group's inventions are considered through evaluation of all prize winners in aggregate and through individual case studies of the prize winners from three particular years. Researchers highlight the substantial benefits to society, both nationally and globally, that have been provided by these inventors' works. The inventions discussed in this report have spawned new products, companies, and, in some cases, entirely new industries. Research also demonstrates that there are many different paths to the successful development and commercialization of inventions, with the success or failure of new inventions not always being entirely under the inventor's control.

After more than 50 years as a manager and VE pioneer, Richard J. Park presents Value Engineering: A Plan for Invention. Park demonstrates how to adopt VE as a thinking process that can enable you to increase your problem solving skills, cultivate innovation, reduce costs, improve productivity, and more. Features

After more than 50 years as a manager and VE pioneer, Richard J. Park presents Value Engineering: A Plan for Invention. Park demonstrates how to adopt VE as a thinking process that can enable you to increase your problem solving skills, cultivate innovation, reduce costs, improve productivity, and more. Features

"Measuring innovation is a challenging task, both for researchers and for national statisticians. This task is timely and valuable given that policy and public interest in innovation has become increasingly intense in this era of digital revolution, yet National GDP Accounts and other economic statistics do not fully account for the wide range of innovative activity that is plainly evident in everyday experience. Indeed, innovation has in many ways changed the structure of an increasingly digitized marketplace, from cloud computing to the gig economy. The papers collected in this volume, Measuring and Accounting for Innovation in the Twenty-First Century, address many different dimensions of this challenge, ranging from how to best to define GDP to the fundamental question of what is an innovation and how to collect data at the level of an individual innovation. Taken together, the volume provides a comprehensive overview of the cutting-edge of this widely varied but thematically-connected research that draws on multiple methodologies and data. The editors and authors consider how measurement frameworks could be expanded to enhance our understanding of innovative activity; new approaches and evidence that could account for innovation's economic impact; innovation's effect across the economy, from production processes to labor markets and financial activities; and what practical adjustments could be made to current measurements that would better capture innovation. The distinctive stance of this volume makes clear that the challenge of measuring innovation and understanding its implications has become increasingly complex as the economy has evolved. The editors and authors show that the limitations of our existing measurement system significantly hinder researchers, analysts, and policymakers. Better measures of innovative activity are necessary to interpret the consequences of innovation in daily life and to inform policies that best promote the attendant benefits, including distribution of income, trademark protections, and more. Now, in an era of fake news and alternative facts, it is more important than ever to push for accuracy in basic economic facts"--

Although employers are required to pay compensation for employee inventions under the laws in many countries, existing legal literature has never critically examined whether such compensation actually gives employee inventors an incentive to invent as the legislature intends. This book addresses the issue through reference to recent, large-scale surveys on the motivation of employee inventors (in Europe, the United States and Japan) and studies in social psychology and econometrics, arguing that the compensation is unlikely to boost the motivation, productivity and creativity of employee inventors, and thereby encourage the creation of inventions. It also discusses the ownership of inventions made by university researchers, giving due consideration to the need to ensure open science and their academic freedom. Challenging popular assumptions, this book provides a solution to a critical issue by arguing that compensation for employee inventions should not be made mandatory regardless of jurisdiction because there is no legitimate reason to require employers to pay it. This means that patent law does not need to give employee inventors an 'incentive to invent' separately from the 'incentive to innovate' which is already given to employers.

The world’s principal measure of the health of economies is gross domestic product, or GDP: the sum of what all of us spend every day, from the contents of our weekly shopping to large capital spending by businesses. GDP also includes the myriad things that our governments pay for, from libraries and road-line painting to naval dockyards and nuclear weapons.The Great Invention reveals how in just a few decades GDP became the world’s most powerful formula: how six algebraic symbols forged in the fires of the 1930's economic crisis helped Europe and America prosper, how the remedy now risks killing the patient it once saved, and how this fundamentally flawed metric is creating the illusion of global prosperity—and why many world leaders want to be able to ignore it but so far remain powerless to do so. Drawing on interviews, firsthand accounts, and previously neglected source materials, The Great Invention takes readers on a journey from Capitol Hill to Whitehall—on the trail of theories made in Cambridge, tested in Karachi, and designed for global application—into the minds of unworldly geniuses seduced by the allure of power and the demands of politics.

Sustaining the New Economy will require public policies that remain relevant to the rapid technological changes that characterize it. While data and its timely analysis are key to effective policy-making, we do not yet have adequate statistical images capturing changes in productivity and growth brought about by the information technology revolution. This report on a STEP workshop highlights the need for more information and the challenges faced in measuring the New Economy and sustaining its growth.