#82 – Tom Kalil on Institutions for Innovation (with Matt Clancy)

Tom Kalil is the CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy.

He also served in the White House for two presidents (under Obama and Clinton); where he helped establish incentive prizes in government through challenge.gov; in addition to dozens of science and tech program. More recently Tom served as the Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures, where he helped launch Convergent Research.

Matt Clancy is an economist and a research fellow at Open Philanthropy. He writes ‘New Things Under the Sun’, which is a living literature review on academic research about science and innovation.

We talked about:

• What is ‘influence without authority’?
• Should public funders sponsor more innovation prizes?
• Can policy entrepreneurship be taught formally?
• Why isn't ultra-wealthy philanthropy much more ambitious?
• What's the optimistic case for increasing US state capacity?
• What was it like being principal staffer to Gordon Moore?
• What is Renaissance Philanthropy?

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