Technology, innovation and the digital economy

How platforms create value by matching groups, unlike linear pipeline businesses.

How Nintendo conquered the American video game market.

How 1980s changes turned the US patent system from aid to obstacle for innovation.

Software platforms as two-sided markets, and how they price and grow.

How Israel, Taiwan and Ireland each used the state to build IT industries.

Why most government efforts to build venture capital sectors fail.

Digital costs near zero mean goods can be given away, which changes whole industries.

How multi-sided platforms such as card networks get both sides on board at once.

AI as a fall in the cost of prediction, and what that does to decisions and jobs.

A report on competition in the telephone industry.

Economics for information goods: pricing, versioning, lock-in and network effects.

Computing is becoming a utility supplied over a network, as electricity did.

Why Israel produces so many tech start-ups, from military service to immigration.

Innovation as a game played by the state, capital markets and competition.

How entrepreneurs spread four centuries of progress to the world's excluded majority.

How fashion, cuisine and other fields thrive on copying without patents or copyright.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee provide the economic context: AI as a general-purpose technology that decouples productivity from employment. The alignment problem doesn't exist in a vacuum — it plays out in economies where AI is already restructuring labor markets in ways that are hard to reverse.

How machine learning and robots will displace work faster than institutions adapt.

The case that blockchain architectures displace the centralised web

How Google and others turn behaviour into data to predict and steer what people do.

Innovation is gradual, collective and bottom-up, not the work of lone inventors.