Title: Nurturing the accumulation of innovations
Description: "The innovations the became the foundation for the Internet originate from two eras that illustrate two distinct models for accumulating innovations over the long haul.  The pre-commercial era illustrates the operation of several useful non-market institutional arrangements.  It also illustrates a potential drawback to government sponsorship - in this instance, truncation of exploratory activity.  The commercial era illustrates a rather different set of lessons.  It highlights the extraordinary power of market-oriented and widely distributed investment and adoption, which illustrates the power of market experimentation to foster innovative activity.  It also illustrates a few of the conditions necessary to unleash value creation from such accumulated lessons, such as standards development and competition, and nurturing legal and regulatory policies"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.