• On March 12, Bill Lazonick gave a keynote lecture, "The Innovative Enterprise and Corporate Governance", at the conference on Financial Market Capitalism - Work - Innovation, run by Soziologisches Forschungsinstitut Göttingen (SOFI) an der Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany.

• Bill Lazonick's article, "The Financialization of the U.S. Corporation: What Has Been Lost, and How It Can Be Regained," Seattle University Law Review, 36, 2, 2013, is available for download. It is in the journal's special issue on The Future of Financial and Securities Markets.

• On March 7, Martyn Roetter published a letter to the editor of the Financial Times in which he criticizes the decline of competition in the U.S. broadband service provider industry.

• On December 6-7, many AIR associates participated in the conference on Finance, Business Models, and Sustainable Prosperity, organized by Bill Lazonick and held at the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York City (see the conference website at www.fiid.org).

• On December 4, in Seoul, South Korea, Bill Lazonick will give a keynote speech at the International Seminar on New Industrial Development Strategy for Job Creation, sponsored by the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade (KIET).

• On December 3, Mariana Mazzucato will be presenting her paper with Bill Lazonick, "The risk-reward nexus in the innovation-inequality relationship", in the UK House of Parliament, with Chuka Umunna, Labour Member of Parliament for Streatham and Shadow Business Secretary as discussant.
  

• On October 9, Bill Lazonick was in Seoul at the World Knowledge Forum, where he was featured in sessions on "Job-Creating Growth" and "For a Better Workplace".

• On August 16, Bill Lazonick gave a public lecture on "Capitalism in Crisis: Makers vs. Takers" at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The event was moderated by Ian Masters, host of the radio programs Background Briefing and The Daily Briefing. Joining in the discussion was Silicon Valley philanthropist and venture capitalist Anny Rappaport. Click here for a video of the event.

• On October 2, Bill Lazonick was in Buenos Aires speaking on "The State and Industrial Development" at the Annual Money and Banking Conference of the Central Bank of Argentina. Click here for a photo of Lazonick being greeted by Mercedes Marcó del Pont, Governor of the Central Bank of Argentina.

• On August 27, Bill Lazonick published a comment on the UK economy in the Guardian online: "Big payouts to shareholders are holding back prosperity".

• AIR associate Dan Breznitz and Michael Murphy’s book, “Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization, and Economic Growth in China,” has been recently awarded the 2012 British International Studies Association (BISA) Susan Strange Prize. The prize recognizes an outstanding book within the international relations field among BISA members.

• Visiting Sydney, Bill Lazonick was interviewed on the national evening business program of the Australian Broadcasting Company: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-10/share-buybacks-leading-to-lack-in-strategic-vision/4122650. He argued that the US practice of stock buybacks not only deprives US corporations of finance for innovation but also gets top executives off the hook for charting strategic visions for the companies that they are supposed to lead.

• On July 6, in Sydney, at an event on Investment, Innovation, and Competitiveness organized by the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia (CEDA), theAIRnet president Bill Lazonick was a featured speaker, along with Craig Emerson, Australian Minister for Trade and Competitiveness; Craig Roy, Deputy Chief Executive, Science, Strategy and People, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO); David Gelb, Lead Partner, R&SD Incentives, KPMG; and Michael Ackland, President and CEO, GE Healthcare Australia and New Zealand.   

• At the annual conference of the Society for the Advancement for Socio-Economics (SASE) at MIT in Cambridge MA on June 28, Bill Lazonick organized a featured panel on the topic, "Does the financial economy dominate the productive economy?"

• In an article in the Guardian and in a Policy Report, Prof. Mariana Mazzucato, an associate of theAIRnet, argued that there is an urgent need in the United States and Europe to "rebalance" the economy so that it rewards those who invest in value creation rather than those who engage in value extraction.

• On May 8, Bill Lazonick was interviewed by Mike Papantonio on the Ed Schultz national radio show. Lazonick talked about the AlterNet article, "3 Corporate Myths that Threaten the Wealth of the Nation," that he co-authored with Ken Jacobson and Lynn Parramore.  

• Announcing the release of a new book, "Refonder l'entreprise"(Refonding The Enterprize), by theAIRnet researchers Blanche Segrestin and Armand Hatchuel. More information about the book can be found at:http://www.seuil.com/livre-9782021064285.htm

• During the first week of April, Bill Lazonick, Ken Jacobson, and Lynn Parramore posted a five-part series on AlterNet under the theme of "Corporations for the 99 Percent", now available as an ebook.  All of these articles have been cross-posted on theAIRnet Perspectives page.  They also appeared on Huffington Post, Naked Capitalism, and Salon.com.

• Bill Lazonick's paper, "Financialization of the US Corporation: What We Have Lost, and How It Can be Regained", shows how stock buybacks and executive pay are undermining innovation, eroding middle-class jobs, and worsening the distribution of income in the United States.

• Research from theAIRnet will be presented in a session on “impatient capital in high-tech industries” at the Industry Studies Assocation annual conference in Pittsburgh on May 29-June 1, 2012. The session will include the following papers:
  
  1- William Lazonick, “The Rise of Impatient Capital in US High-Tech Industries”
  2- Bob Bell, Marie Carpenter, and William Lazonick “From Innovation to Financialization: How Cisco Became Focused on Its Stock Price and Lost Its Way”
  3- William Lazonick, Mustafa Erdem Sakinç, and Öner Tulum, “Productless IPOS and the Sustainability of the US Biopharmaceutical Industry”
  4- Matt Hopkins and William Lazonick, “Soaking up the Sun and Blowing in the Wind: Renewable Energy Needs Patient Capital”

• The final conference of the Finance, Innovation & Growth (FINNOV) project, took place in London in the House of Commons on February 1, 2012, and Italian Cultural Institute on February 2, 2012. FINNOV's this final event, "Financing Innovation and Growth: Reforming a Dysfunctional System", emphasized the necessity of an "immediate financial reform to end the crisis and drive economic growth". FINNOV Coordinator and theAIRnet director Mariana Mazzucato's paper, "Co-Evolution of Industry Dynamics and Financial Dynamics", and theAIRnet president William Lazonick's paper, "Impatient Capital in the US Economy", were presented in the "Economic Performance: Misleading Indicators and Distorted Incentives" session.   

• theAIRnet directors Mariana Mazzucato and William Lazonick's article, "Explaining rising income inequality" appeared on the NewStatesman on February 1, 2012.

theAIRnet News                                                                                                                                              2011

• William Lazonick's article, "Innovative Business Models and Varieties of Capitalism: The Financialization of the US Corporation" had been awarded the Henrietta Larson Prize for best article in 2010 in Business History Review, published by Harvard Business School. The article is available at http://www.hbs.edu/bhr/84/4/innovative-business-models.html. It is the second time that Lazonick has won the prize for best article in Business History Review. The first time was in 1983 for an article on the decline of the British economy. 

• Bill Lazonick was interviewed on August 6, 2011 by Sam Seder on Ring of Fire Radio on the subject of executive stock options and the impact on corporate resource allocation. On December 27, Seder included this interview in his "best of 2011" interviews on his Majority Report talk show: http://majority.fm/2011/12/27/1227-bobby-kennedy-jr-bill-lazonick-rosen-v-rosen/ 

• Professor Mariana Mazzucato of The Open University, and theAIRnet board member, helped to write Plan B: A Good Economy for a Good Society, that lays out a policy agenda for maintaining existing jobs and creating new ones in the United Kingdom, in opposition to the current government's Plan A that sees the future only in terms of budget cuts and austerity. See the story of October 29, 2011 in the Guardian.

• The review of theAIRnet President William Lazonick's latest book "Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States" by Rosemary L. Batt and Jae Eun Lee has been published in the Vol. 64, Iss. 5 of Industrial and Labor Relations Review, a publication of Cornell University Industrial and Labor Relations School. Batt and Lee describes the book as:
  
  ... a must-read for scholars and students in [human resource studies, organizational behavior, and labor relations] fields. [Lazonick] has chosen to study an important problem in the real world, has marshaled detailed empirical evidence to support his argument, and has used this evidence to critique conventional theory in economics and management....
  
  Review Essay of "Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States" can be downloaded from the website of Industrial and Labor Relations Review. 
  

• President of theAIRnet, William Lazonick, has been interviewed as part of the series "30 Ways to Be an Economist". The 30 people interviewed in this series are those, such as Lazonick, who received inaugural grants from the Institute for New Economic Thinking in 2010. In the video of the interview at the bottom of this page, Lazonick talks about his research on the evolution of the US business corporation, emphasizing the damaging impacts on innovation, equity, stability, and growth of the shift from a productive to a financial orientation of its top executives over the past three decades.

• theAIRnet researchers, William Lazonick and Öner Tulum, have published an article, "US biopharmaceutical finance and the sustainability of the biotech business model", in the latest issue of Research Policy.

• President of theAIRnet, William Lazonick, gave a talk, "From Innovation Financializa: How Shareholder Value Ideology is Destroying the U.S. Economy," at Fundación MAPFRE, in Madrid on September 29, 2011. 

• Announcing the release of a new book, "La bataille des télécom: Vers une France numérique" (The battle to build a digital France), by theAIRnet director Marie Carpenter. More information about the book can be found on the Institut Telecom's website:
  http://www.institut-telecom.fr.

• theAIRnet director Mariana Mazzucato's article, "The state doesn't need the private sector to be entrepreneurial" appeared on the NewStatesman magazine's online rolling blog, The Staggers, on July 11, 2011. 

• Announcing the release of a new pamphlet, "The Entrepreneurial State," by theAIRnet director Mariana Mazzucato. Details of the pamphlet as well as the launching event that took place in the UK Parliement on July 11, 2011 can be found at the DEMOS UK's website:http://www.demos.co.uk/events/launchoftheentrepreneurialstate.  

• In a brand-new series, "Breaking through the Jobless Recovery," economist Bill Lazonick takes on the structural changes and reforms needed to create good jobs in the U.S. These posts, which commenced on June 23, will appear every Thursday on Roosevelt Institute's New Deal 2.0 website: http://newdeal20.org/.

• At its first annual board meeting on June 17, 2011, theAIRnet appointed four new directors that will join the existing governing board. theAIRnet welcomes Mary Adams, Dan Breznitz, Chris Mackin and Mariana Mazzucato as new members of the board.

• Announcing the release of a new book, "Run of the Red Queen", by theAIRnet associates Dan Breznitz and Michael Murphree. A commentary on the book appeared in the Schumpeter column of the Economist magazine on May 5th, 2011.   

• The review of theAIRnet President William Lazonick's latest book "Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States" by Michael A. Bernstein has been published in the Spring 2011 issue of Business History Review, a publication of Harvard Business School. Bernstein describes the book as:   
  
  ... a bold and wholly engaged attempt to make sense of decades of structural change in the American economy. It is a work that merits close attention from theorists, analysts, policymakers, and historians alike... 
  
  Review Essay of "Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States" can be downloaded from the website of Business History Review.   

• William Lazonick and theAIRnet have received a grant from the institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) for a project on "The Stock Market and Innovative Enterprise".

• The International Schumpeter Society awarded the 2010 Schumpeter Prize to William Lazonick for his book, Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States (Upjohn Institute, 2009).  

Over the past three decades, the information and communication technology (ICT) industries have propelled the growth of the U.S.economy. In the process there has been a dramatic transformation in the dominant mode of business organization that characterizes ICT, as the "New Economy business model" (NEBM) has replaced the "Old Economy business model" (OEBM). And although NEBM has been central to the microelectronics revolution, it has also been a source of employment instability and inequity in the distribution of income.