This talk is hosted by the Oxford Martin School and INET@Oxford

Summary: The innovation economy begins with discovery and culminates in speculation. Over some 250 years, economic growth has been driven by successive processes of trial and error: upstream exercises in research and invention and downstream experiments in exploiting the new economic space opened by innovation. Drawing on his professional experiences, William H. Janeway will provide an accessible pathway to appreciate the dynamics of the innovation economy. He will combine personal reflections from a career spanning forty years in venture capital, with the development of an original theory of the role of asset bubbles in financing technological innovation and of the role of the state in playing an enabling role in the innovation process. Today, with the state frozen as an economic actor and access to the public equity markets only open to a minority, the innovation economy is stalled; learning these lessons from this talk will contribute to its renewal.

Speaker: William H. Janeway CBE, Senior Advisor and Managing Director at Warburg Pincus

Biography: William H. Janeway has lived a double life of "theorist-practitioner," according to the legendary economist Hyman Minsky who first applied that term to him twenty-five years ago. In his role as "practitioner," Bill Janeway has been an active venture capital investor for more than 40 years. During that time he built and led the Warburg Pincus Technology Investment team that provided financial backing to a series of companies making critical contributions to the internet economy, including BEA Systems, Veritas Software and, more recently, Nuance Communications, the speech recognition company. He remains actively engaged as a Senior Advisor and Managing Director at Warburg Pincus.

As a "theorist," Janeway received a Ph.D in Economics from Cambridge University where he was a Marshall Scholar. His doctoral study on the formulation of economic policy following the Great Crash of 1929 was supervised by Keynes' leading student, Richard Kahn (author of the foundational paper on "the multiplier.") Janeway went on to found the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance. Currently he serves as a Teaching Visitor at the Princeton University Economics Department and Visiting Scholar in the Economics Faculty of Cambridge University.

Janeway is a director of Magnet Systems, Nuance Communications, O'Reilly Media and a member of the Board of Managers of Roubini Global Economics. He is a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council, and a co-founder and member of the Governing Board of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET).

Janeway's latest book is 'Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets, Speculation and the State' Cambridge University Press (October 31, 2012)

The talk will be followed by a drinks reception