The Capitalist's Dilemma

Sixty months after the 2008 recession ended, the economy was still sputtering, producing disappointing growth and job numbers. Corporations seemed stuck: Despite low interest rates, they were sitting on massive piles of cash and failing to invest in new initiatives. In this article, a leading innovation expert and his HBS colleague explore the reasons for this sluggishness. The crux of the problem, they say, is that investments in different types of innovation have different effects on growth but are all evaluated using the same (flawed) metrics. "Performance-improving innovations," which replace old products with better models, and "efficiency innovations," which lower costs, don't produce many jobs. (Indeed, efficiency innovations eliminate them.) "Market-creating innovations," which transform products so radically they create a new class of consumer, do generate jobs for their originators and for the economy. But the assessment metrics that financial markets—and companies—use always show efficiency and performance-improving innovations to be better opportunities. This is the capitalist's dilemma: Doing the right thing for long-term prosperity is the wrong thing for investors, according to the tools that guide investments. Those tools, however, are based on an unexamined assumption: that capital is scarce, and that performance should be assessed by how efficiently companies use it. The truth is, capital is no longer scarce, and our tools need to catch up to that reality.