big companies are not good at the early stages of innovation, when wild creativity, leaps of faith, and irrational amounts of time spent on superficially unpromising ideas are the norm.

Picasso said of computers: “But they are useless. They can only give you answers.” Computers don’t yet know how to ask better questions or do anything that goes beyond the framework of their programming. “We’ve never seen a truly creative machine, or an entrepreneurial one, or an innovative one,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee write.

In economic theory, entrepreneurship is the fourth “factor of production” along with land, labor, and capital.

Baumol’s The Microtheory of Innovative Entrepreneurship pulls together the strands of his work on the economics of entrepreneurship over several decades.

All markets are created and have rules and conditions. What constitutes a market is always a political definition.

entrepreneurs is as suppliers of inventions,

ICT, for example, has had the biggest effect when used alongside business process innovation such as lean manufacturing, or management concepts such as Total Quality Management and Six Sigma.

there always seems to be a substantial lag between the introduction of a technology and increasing productivity across the economy. For example, despite the introduction of electricity to American factories in the 1890s, there was no labor productivity surge for another twenty years. Initially, factories simply replaced steam engines with electrica

As an investment in a college education involves a fair degree of risk (anything can happen with the economy, with our health, and our skills and knowledge can be made obsolete), and is extremely illiquid (our education can’t be separated from ourselves and sold off),