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" Politics of Innovation: The Entrepreneurial State and the Making of Israel’s ‘Start-Up Nation’ "
Maggor, Erez
Chibber, Vivek
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1055016
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| Doc. No
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TL54133
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| Main Entry
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Maggor, Erez
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| Title & Author
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Politics of Innovation: The Entrepreneurial State and the Making of Israel’s ‘Start-Up Nation’\ Maggor, ErezChibber, Vivek
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| College
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New York University
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| Date
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2020
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| Note
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190 p.
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| Abstract
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Over the last three decades, Israel has emerged as a global leader in the development of innovative technologies. Previously a manufacturer of textiles, clothing, and processed food, it currently designs and produces computer software, information and communication technologies, electro-optical devices, and cyber-security solutions. This dissertation examines this profound historical transformation as a structural shift from traditional industries to technological innovation. Using a historical-comparative approach, I underscore the crucial role of policymakers within Israel’s Ministry of Trade and Industry and Office of the Chief Scientist in orchestrating this shift. These public officials, I show, launched a bold attempt to restructure the Israeli economy, designing and implementing a host of ambitious policy measures. These programs and institutions combined public incentives and disciplining mechanisms– carrots and sticks – to propel otherwise reluctant private actors towards making long term investments in technological upgrading and scaling up their operations locally. Whereas the existing scholarship emphasizes the exceptional features of the Israeli case and the role of market mechanisms, my approach stresses the vital role of targeted innovation policies advanced by an ‘entrepreneurial’ developmental state. I rely on state and industry archives, historical periodicals and newspapers, and in-depth interviews with government officials and business leaders. To explain why targeted innovation policies were effective, I embed policy developments and state capacity within broader political-economic and social structures. Organizing my analysis along these lines, I trace the state’s efforts to renegotiate longstanding alliances with leaders of traditional industry, both business and labor, as well as incorporate new groups from emerging sectors of industry. Once established, this “upgrading coalition” functioned as a key forum for intragroup coordination and state-business cooperation. Far from a sharp break from earlier patterns, the legacies of Israel’s earlier industrialization proved vital. Here I stress, in particular, how Israeli state managers drew on the institutions and political alliances forged in the 1950s and 1960s. These earlier foundations were then redeployed in a new configuration suited for the specific challenges of innovation-led development. Finally, the emphasis on government policy allows me to identify Israel not as a stand-alone case, but as one of a small number of historically low-technology states that made similar attempts to transform their economies in the aftermath of the crisis of the 1970s. I compare Israel with Taiwan and Ireland, attending to both industrial strategies and developmental outcomes, in order to generalize my findings of the Israeli case. I examine the variation between the three cases to examine several counterfactuals and illuminate a variety of alternative pathways to state-led economic development.
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| Descriptor
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Business administration
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Economics
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Entrepreneurship
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Information technology
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Political science
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Public administration
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Public policy
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Social structure
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Sociology
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| Added Entry
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Chibber, Vivek
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| Added Entry
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New York University
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