A Calculation of the Social Returns to Innovation

What are the social returns to investments in innovation? The disparate spillovers associated with innovation, including imitation, business stealing, and intertemporal spillovers, have made calculations of the social returns difficult. Northwestern Kellogg School of Management’s Benjamin F. Jones will provide an economy-wide calculation that nets out the many spillover margins. He will assess the role of capital investment, diffusion delays, learning-by-doing, productivity mismeasurement, health outcomes, and international spillovers in assessing the average social returns. Overall, estimates suggest that the social returns are very large. Even under conservative assumptions, innovation efforts produce social benefits that are many multiples of the investment costs.

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The Telemobility University Transportation Center (UTC), a partnership of Northwestern, UC Berkeley and UT Austin, is pleased to announce the second in a series of Telemobility Virtual Roundtables (TVR) aimed at understanding the supply side of tele-activities and e-processes and their impact on the demand for travel and mobility.

eLearning has emerged as a major phenomenon during the pandemic, and has generated considerable debate among education professionals, public officials and community members, especially parents and caregivers. How much of that experience remains in one form or another post-pandemic could have major impacts on the travel patterns of households with children. The objective of this webinar is for transportation and mobility professionals to engage in a conversation with education experts to better understand likely developments in this area. In this webinar, we will focus on K-8 education, with higher levels to be examined in future roundtables.

The TVR will be moderated by Dr. Shirin Vossoughi, Assistant Professor, Learning Sciences, School of Education and Social Policy (SESP) at Northwestern, the TVR streams Thursday, February 4th at 3pm CT. The panelists will include Dr. Stacy Beardsley, Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction, Evanston/Skokie School District 65 in Evanston, Illinois; Ms. Sana Jafri, Executive Director of the Chicago Learning Exchange (CLX); and Dr. Marcelo Worsley, Assistant Professor of Education and Social Policy at SESP and Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern. Telemobility UTC Director, Professor Hani S. Mahmassani, will lead audience questions and answers.

Telemobility Virtual Roundtable (TVR) 2:

“Is there a future for eLearning for K-8? Lessons learned from the pandemic”

Thursday, February 4, 2021 @ 3pm CT

Please click this link to join the webinar:

https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/92534368611

Join the conversation on Twitter:

@TelemobilityUTC / #TVR2

Related Info

Healthcare innovation has taken off despite — and because of — the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Join us as US business editor for The Economist and Visiting Farley Fellow Vijay Vaitheeswaran moderates a panel discussing the latest advances in the field and how the very process of innovation is being reinvented right now. We’ll cover topics in digital health, including telemedicine, "quantified self" devices, consumer empowerment through smart apps, and back-office automation using robotic process automation and AI. We’ll also explore how the pandemic has led to an evolution in process such as open innovation in pharmaceuticals, an industry which has traditionally been secretive about research and development.

Moderator
Vijay Vaitheeswaran
US business editor for The Economist; Visiting Farley Fellow

Panelists

Vivian Lee
Author of The Long Fix: Solving America’s Health Care Crisis; President of Health Platforms at Verily Life Sciences (Alphabet); and senior lecturer at Harvard

Milton Morris
Kellogg MBA '04, President & CEO at NeuSpera Medical

John Rogers
Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Neurological Surgery (and by courtesy Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Chemistry)

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