Does government spending on healthcare R&D drive economic growth? A new study out this week argues that it does. Researchers at Indiana University and the Max Planck Institute for Economic analysis in Germany looked at the impact of grant giving by the National Cancer Institute, tracing what happened after researchers got their hands on government funding. The result, the report concludes, is far more start-up activity than had been expected. One quarter of the 1,700 researchers the group studied went on to form their own companies, "an astonishingly high rate of entrepreneurship." The report will be posted on the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Web site today.
- see this article from The New York Times
- visit the Kauffman Foundation site