“Inventing Ideas: Economic History and the Future of Innovation” - Zorina Khan, William D. Shipman Professor of Economics Inaugural Lecture

Creative ideas are at the heart of social progress and help to explain why the United States has long been a global leader in technology, art, music, literature—and even economics. What sorts of ideas and institutions promote individual and national success? Do improvements in starships generate more benefits than improvements in paper clips? When and how do democratic precepts about diversity, access, and inclusion matter? Throughout time and place, many myths about inventions have persisted in policy, podcasts, and the writings of Nobel economists. Getting the historical record straight is essential for confronting such twenty-first-century challenges as the diffusion of digital innovations and artificial intelligence.

Zorina Khan is the William D. Shipman Professor of Economics at Bowdoin College and research associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). She earned her BSc (first class honours) from Surrey University (England), MA from McMaster University (Canada), and a PhD in economics from UCLA. She teaches Law and Economics, the Economics of Art and Culture, Digital Economics and Artificial Intelligence, among other courses.

Professor Khan has given numerous presentations throughout the world to academic, professional, and popular audiences. She been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, Stanford University, NYU Law School, UC Berkeley Law School, UCLA Law School, Harvard University, UCLA Economics and Business Program, and Australian National University. She was the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and Arch W. Shaw Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Her pioneering research quantitatively analyzes the history, law, and economics of intellectual property rights, entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic growth in Britain, Europe, and the United States. Her current book project, Women in the Republic of Enterprise, investigates the role of women as investors, inventors, and entrepreneurs. 

Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including the NBER’s biennial Griliches Fellowship for excellence in empirical scholarship, the Leonardo da Vinci Award, the Adam Smith Medallion, and a Fulbright Scholarship. She recently received the 2024 Henrietta Larson Prize for best journal article. Both of her monographs, The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790–1920 and Inventing Ideas: Patents, Prizes, and the Knowledge Economy, were awarded the Alice Hanson Jones Biennial Prize for the most outstanding book in American economic history.

For more information, contact Jenn Berube at jberube@bowdoin.edu or 207-725-3928.

Open to the public free of charge.