Vijay Vaitheeswaran is the China Business Editor and Shanghai Bureau Chief at The Economist, where his editorial responsibilities range from business and finance to science, technology and innovation. His is the author of Need, Speed, and Greed: How the New Rules of Innovation Can Transform Businesses, Propel Nations to Greatness, and Tame the World’s Most Wicked Problems (2012), and also of Power to the People: How the Coming Energy Revolution Will Transform an Industry, Change Our Lives, and Maybe Even Save the Planet (2004).
Vijay is a life member at the Council on Foreign Relations, an advisor on sustainability and innovation to the World Economic Forum, and a regular speaker at the Clinton Global Initiative. Vijay has also taught at NYU’s Stern Business School, and his commentaries have appeared on NPR and the BBC, in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the New York Times. He has had the honor of addressing groups ranging from the US National Governors’ Association and the UN General Assembly to the Technology, Entertainment & Design (TED), Aspen Ideas Festival and AAAS conferences. He also serves as chairman of The Economist’s series of conferences on known as the Ideas Economy. Vijay is an engineering graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was named Harry S. Truman Presidential Scholar by the U.S. Congress.
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The world economy is at a perilous crossroads. Consider the challenges facing the regional and global economy: long-term global problems like climate change, demography and healthcare, and more short-term concerns like stagnant growth and the jobs squeeze in OECD economies, and financial peril in emerging markets–including China’s rising and unrecognized risks. Adversity can be turned into opportunity, however, if firms and individuals learn the new rules of global innovation to help tame these wicked global problems. Radical business models are emerging from unexpected parts of the world and transforming global markets in industry after industry. This wave of disruption will wipe out many incumbents, but those dinosaurs that learn to dance will thrive. A growing chorus of doom claims that productivity growth is peaking, that technology brings joblessness, and that innovation is dead, but for those far-sighted and flexible enough to change with the times, the golden age still lies ahead.
