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Betamax Innovation

Decent Essays

With the standard innovation spillovers that innovation policy scholars are used to considering, innovators benefit one another because each individual innovator is unable to reap the full rewards from her innovations. This feature captures an important part of the innovation process, but not the whole story. Another feature is path dependence in innovation, in which the innovation choices of past innovators influence the types of innovation pursued by future innovators. Path dependence spillovers do not necessarily directly benefit innovators. Rather, they redirect innovators toward the types of technologies with the larger stock of knowledge by changing the relative profitability of different types of technologies. Redirecting technological …show more content…

For what many think were largely idiosyncratic reasons, VHS won out over Betamax, despite there being little inherent advantage of one over the other. As a result, VHS technology kept on advancing, while Betamax did not. But imagine that society later discovered that VHS, but not Betamax, produced a big negative externality. This is essentially the story of energy technology: fossil fuels have benefited from decades of innovation, which largely explains why they are cheaper than clean energy. Unless the VHS externality were catastrophic, the best way to switch from VHS to Betamax would not be to suddenly apply a large tax on VHS—that would inefficiently lead to a surge in consumer prices for videos. Rather, as we show below, the solution would be to subsidize innovation (in concert with a modest tax) so that the stock of Betamax innovation could catch up with the stock of VHS innovation—resulting in companies eventually choosing to invest in the Betamax technology by virtue of both the price signal and the stock of innovation that enables it to be made cheaply and with high …show more content…

Under these circumstances, there are four dirtytech blocks and only one cleantech block, reflecting the reality that dirtytech has a century head start on cleantech. As a result of this mismatch in knowledge stocks, dirtytech produces electricity at a much lower cost than cleantech, even in the presence of a carbon tax. Consider the incentives facing the profit-maximizing innovator. She knows that she can immediately commercialize an innovation in dirtytech because it would reduce the cost of the already-cheapest form of electricity-producing technology. Thus, she can profit in the near term. In contrast, if she innovates in cleantech, there is no guarantee of profits, at least in the near-term. A single innovation—i.e., a single innovation block—will not be enough for cleantech to overtake dirtytech as the cheapest form of energy production in the short run. Instead, energy producers will continue to rely on dirtytech—and the cleantech innovator will receive little for her efforts. Faced with such incentives, then, the profit-maximizing innovator will likely invest in dirtytech, thereby further increasing its profitability and entrenching its dominance. Of course, in a more complex model, some innovators will have such brilliant cleantech innovations that they will invest in cleantech even if the product would be far from commercialization, but the overall tendency will

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