Industrial Policy in Action: Lessons from Over a Decade at the Department of Energy
The energy sector stands at an inflection point. After 15 years of remarkable change, the convergence of surging electricity demand, climate pressures, and emerging industries promises even more rapid transformation. This presentation and discussion draws on Garrett’s experience at the Department of Energy and Waypoint Strategy Group to explore the path from research to commercialization, the impacts of policy on technology development and deployment, and the broader ecosystem that makes modern energy systems work. We’ll close with a look at what the coming years may hold.
Speaker: Garrett Nilsen, Co-Founder and Partner Waypoint Strategy Group
Moderator: Ketan Ahuja, Growth Lab Research Fellow
Getting Things Done: Issue Spotting in the Infrastructure Development Projects Ecosystem
In this Development Talk, Bill Dobbs shares a front‑row view of how public policy, governance, and engineering intersect in real‑world settings. He offers Insights into how large public works succeed—or fail—depending on governance, institutions, and the quality of decision‑making and practical advice to future policy makers on infrastructure project management.
Speaker: Bill Dobbs, Former Civil and Structural Engineer and Project Manager
Moderator: Ricardo Hausmann, Director, Growth Lab
From Vacant Houses to Growth-Ready Capabilities: A Place-Based Growth Diagnostic
This talk explores housing vacancy as a source of insight into how cities can unlock new growth opportunities. Using Baltimore as a case study, it highlights how strengthening institutional coordination, capital access, and prevention capacity can shape more resilient development trajectories. The talk connects place-based innovation to Growth Lab frameworks on capabilities, complexity, and structural transformation.
Speaker: Terrance Smith, Chief Innovation Officer for the city of Baltimore
Moderator: Tim O’Brien, Senior Manager, Applied Research
Innovation Capabilities Outlook: Key Findings
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) presents the key findings from the inaugural Innovation Capabilities Outlook 2026. This first comprehensive mapping of global innovation capabilities, developed in partnership with Harvard’s Growth Lab, reveals a stark global innovation divide, quantifies massive untapped potential worth hundreds of thousands of missing innovations annually, and demonstrates how successful economies like Vietnam, China, and India have mastered strategic capability building.
This video features insights from Professor Ricardo Hausmann and positions the Innovation Capabilities Outlook as strategic intelligence for innovation policy and economic development decisions worldwide.
Where do countries’ innovation-related strengths lie and how can they build on them?
The World Intellectual Property Organization’s new Innovation Capabilities Outlook analyzes 2.5 billion data points to map innovation capabilities across 193 countries, showing where potential remains untapped and how to unlock it.
In this video, Professor Ricardo Hausmann explains why measuring innovation capabilities matters for economic growth.
Exiting the Resource Curse: The Political Economy of Natural Resource Management in Latin America
In this Development talk, Osmel Manzano, Adjunct Professor at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, discusses the key challenges and opportunities for effective natural resource management in Latin America, and its implications for economic development and productive diversification.
Speaker: Osmel Manzano, Adjunct Professor at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service
Moderator: Lucas Lamby, Growth Lab Fellow
#DevTalks Green Growth by Design: The Science and Strategy of Greenplexity
A live demo and Q&A with Professor Ricardo Hausmann on the release of next-gen Greenplexity, a groundbreaking data and strategy tool that reveals how countries can identify their most promising opportunities across ten value chains at the heart of the global energy transition.
Speakers:
Ricardo Hausmann, Director, Growth Lab
Annie White, Director of Software Tools
Ketan Ahuja, Research Fellow
Moderator: Daniel Schrag, Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment
AI and Economic Development: An Open-Source Angle on Opportunities, Challenges, and Policy Implications
Thomas Wolf, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, discusses how AI is influencing dynamics in economic development, and explore the key challenges facing policymakers and researchers as they work to understand and guide these transformations. HuggingFace operates the leading open platform for collaboration in AI.
Speaker: Thomas Wolf, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face
Moderator: Pierre-Alex Balland, Visiting Fellow at the Growth Lab, and Chief Data Scientist at the Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS)
A Computational View of Life and Intelligence
“Life” and “intelligence” are terms with heavily contested meanings. In this discussion, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, VP/Fellow, CTO of Technology & Society at Google offers a novel, unified perspective on both, life and intelligence as described in his new book, What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds.
Speaker: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, VP/Fellow, CTO of Technology & Society at Google
Moderator: Ricardo Hausmann, Director Harvard’s Growth Lab
How to Boost Economic Growth and Innovation
In this episode of WIPO’s Mission Imagination series, Ricardo Hausmann explains the crucial role that knowhow plays in promoting economic growth and development, shares what governments and the private sector can do to foster knowledge networks and expand capabilities, thinking of economic complexity like a game of Scrabble.