The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 520 pages
• Published by: Princeton University Press October 5, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0691135177
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0691135175
• Book Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Weighs: 1.8 pounds

Product Review
Arguments for protectionism are based on fears that are wholly at odds with the evidence. The experience of recent years does not support the idea that millions of jobs will be outsourced to cheap foreign locations. . . . [Amar Bhidé argues] it is in the application of innovations to meet the requirements of consumers that most economic value is created, so what matters is not so much where the innovation happens but where the 'venturesome consumers' are to be found. America's consumers show no signs of becoming less venturesome, and its government remains committed to the idea that the customer is king.
(Matthew Bishop The Economist )

Meticulously researched, clearly written and based on interviews with chief executive officers, the book offers a ground-breaking and counter-intuitive view of innovation and globalization.
(Diana Furchtgott-Roth New York Post )

Product Review
If I were asked to recommend to the next president just one book on the trajectory of the U.S. economy in the next several years, it would unhesitatingly be Amar Bhidé's The Venturesome Economy. The book is an utterly original interpretation of the nature of the complex process of innovation. Among other things, it makes a mockery of the simplistic, alarmist writings that have become so popular in these troublesome economic times. As a student myself of the lovely, kinky history of real innovation, I almost found myself audibly cheering as I raced through this seminal text.
(Thomas J. Peters, coauthor of "In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies" )

Reader Reviews
I found Bhide's new book excellent on a number of levels. He makes quite convincing overall cases for his leading theses: first, that 'venturesome' actors throughout the US economy --including especially businesses as customers willing to try out new technologies offered them-- have been the key to the US distinctive productivity performance and second, the related and surprising proposition that fundamental research --so long as it gets done somewhere--has not been and won't be the driver of relative growth performance for the US in the future. Bhide does a good job with the supporting lines of his inquiry. He provides a first-rate description of the whys and hows of venture capital-supported enterprises. He also carries the argument that many, even large-scale investments in new processes and techniques in the services sector and elsewhere that have turned out to be fundamentally important to productivity advances were done, not with a fine economic calculus of costs and benefits, but rather in an entrepreneurial, venturesome spirit in the face of 'Knightian,' unquantifiable uncertainty. I found the book rich with nuanced and illuminating business examples taken from his research for the book. Nice to have a bold set of propositions built from a real-world, fact- based approach.