Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators and the State

"the primary purpose of the book that follows was to explore how the evolutionary process of economic growth driven by technological innovation has depended upon the constructive, although often unwitting, collaboration of mission-driven state actors and financial speculators. Much of the most recent iteration of this process I lived as a working venture capitalist, while drawing on my education in the economics of John Maynard Keynes to grasp how state investment motivated by national security could trigger a productive bubble in the capital markets and radically accelerate the new economy in which we are all learning to live. The book comprises four parts. The first two offer a chronicle of how I simultaneously learned how the game works and how to play it. They serve as an on- ramp to the frontier of innovation, where progress is achieved through Darwinian processes of trial and error, subject to intense competitive pressure under conditions of uncertainty, even ignorance, about the consequences of action and the returns on investment"--