S9 Ep26: The public origins of American innovation

The standard story of American innovation features Silicon Valley, venture capital, and the heroic startup founder.When you trace the history of the internet, GPS, mass-produced penicillin, or the COVID vaccine, the starting point is not a term sheet but a government grant. How much does this matter, and can we measure it?

Tim Phillips speaks to Paolo Surico of London Business School and CEPR who, working with Andrea Gazzani, Joseba Martinez, and Filippo Natoli, has built the first systematic empirical account of how government-funded innovation has shaped US productivity since the Second World War. The headline result: government-funded patents account for roughly 2% of all patents filed in the post-war period, but explain around 20% of medium-term fluctuations in total factor productivity and GDP growth. The return on every dollar of public R&D is more than double the return on every dollar of private R&D. The key mechanism is not that government crowds out private investment; it crowds it in. For every dollar of public research, roughly another dollar of private investment follows, as talent from universities and research institutes moves into startups that commercialise what the public sector seeded. The logic is high-risk, high-reward: the government takes on the uncertainty and fixed costs that the private sector will not bear, accepting a large number of failures in order to find the breakthroughs that private capital would never have funded.

The model is now under pressure: 2025 brought the largest cuts to US federal science funding in the post-war period. AI adds a further complication: for the first time, a general-purpose technology is being driven primarily by private capital, and that capital is now pulling the best scientific talent out of research institutes and universities and into industry. If that shift becomes permanent, the direction of innovation will be shaped by profitability rather than by broad productivity and living standards.

The paper discussed in this episode:

Gazzani, Andrea, Joseba Martinez, Filippo Natoli, and Paolo Surico. 2026. "The Public Origins of American Innovation." CEPR Discussion Paper DP20788. Centre for Economic Policy Research. [gated]

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Paolo Surico. 2026. "The Public Origins of American Innovation." VoxTalks Economics (podcast/video).

Assign this as extra viewing. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.

About the guest

Paolo Surico is Professor of Economics at London Business School and a Research Fellow of CEPR. [verify URL before publishing] His research focuses on macroeconomics, monetary policy, and the economics of innovation and growth. He has advised central banks and governments on macroeconomic policy and is one of the leading empirical macroeconomists working on the aggregate effects of technology and public investment.

Research cited in this episode

Science: The Endless Frontier (Vannevar Bush, 1945) is the report commissioned by President Roosevelt as the Second World War was ending. Bush, Roosevelt's chief scientific advisor, was asked to distil what the wartime mobilisation of research had taught, and how it could be translated into a peacetime innovation ecosystem. The report identified three pillars: government, to set the direction of innovation by funding areas of strategic importance; research institutes and universities, to push the frontier of knowledge without the constraint of commercial goals; and the private sector, to transform new knowledge into new products. The framework became the organisational blueprint for post-war American science and, Surico argues, is the institutional foundation of American technological and economic leadership. The report is in the public domain and available online.

The NIH and NSF are the two federal agencies whose funded innovations show the strongest subsequent links to productivity growth in the paper's results. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) funds health and biomedical research; the NSF (National Science Foundation) funds basic research across science and engineering. Both are predominantly funders of university and research-institute work — which is, Surico argues, precisely why their output generates larger productivity gains than defence-funded innovation. The result is not that health research is inherently more productive than defence research; it is that both the NIH and NSF fund more basic, frontier-pushing work, and that basic research generates the largest spillovers regardless of the department that pays for it.

Crowding in versus crowding out is the central empirical question in the public R&D literature. Crowding out would mean that government spending on research displaces private spending that would have happened anyway, leaving total innovation roughly unchanged. Crowding in means the opposite: public research creates opportunities and trains talent that then attracts additional private investment. The paper finds consistent evidence of crowding in, particularly when government funds flow to universities and research institutes. For every dollar of public R&D, roughly another dollar of private investment follows, typically as researchers from publicly funded institutions move into startups to commercialise what they developed. This is why the aggregate return on public R&D is more than double the return on private R&D, even though government-funded patents are only two percent of the total.

The Solyndra and Tesla parallel is used to illustrate why anecdote-based arguments about public R&D are unreliable. Solyndra — a solar energy company that received a US government loan guarantee and then failed spectacularly — is a frequently cited example of government waste in innovation funding. Tesla received a loan guarantee in the same round of funding and became one of the most valuable companies in history. Surico's broader point is that the government's logic for innovation investment is high-risk, high-reward: it should expect and accept a large number of failures, because the gains from the successes — when they are large enough — more than compensate for the losses. Evaluating public R&D by its failures misses this; evaluating it by its headline successes also misses it. Systematic analysis across the whole portfolio is required.

Philippe Aghion's Nobel Prize lecture is cited by Surico on the relationship between innovation, competition, and market structure. Aghion, who shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018, developed Schumpeterian growth theory — the idea that economic growth is driven by creative destruction, with new entrants displacing incumbents through innovation. The key implication Surico draws on is that incumbents have a structural incentive not to innovate disruptively, because doing so would destroy the market position they already hold. Startups, which have no existing position to protect, are the natural vehicle for disruptive innovation. This is why the paper finds that government-funded startups generate larger macroeconomic impacts than government-funded incumbents: startups have both the mandate from public funding and the commercial incentive to take market share.

DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the US defence department's high-risk research arm, responsible for funding some of the most consequential technologies of the post-war era, including early internet infrastructure. Surico mentions a less celebrated DARPA project — an attempt to embed microchips into bags for tracking, before drone technology made the approach obsolete — as an example of a genuine failure. It illustrates the high failure rate that comes with high-risk public R&D, and the importance of evaluating the portfolio rather than individual projects.

The Draghi report on European competitiveness is cited by Surico as a potential catalyst for a different model of European public investment in innovation. Europe's problem, in his analysis, is not the level of public spending but its composition: too much goes to procurement and too little to basic research and later-stage startup support. Europe has the talent, the research institutes, and the early-stage startups. What it consistently lacks is the capacity to fund the scaling-up phase, which causes European innovations and innovators to be commercialised in the United States. A reallocation of spending toward public R&D that acts as a venture catalyst for later-stage startups — analogous to what Vannevar Bush's framework did for the US after 1945 — is what Surico believes the Draghi report could enable, if acted on.