---
id: "pisquared:interview/arora-ashish"
type: "Pi-Squared interview"
title: "Anita McGahan in conversation with Ashish Arora"
url: "https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/arora-ashish"
date: "2026-10-08"
people: ["Anita McGahan","Ashish Arora"]
summary: "Ashish Arora is the Rex D. Adams Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. His research focuses on the..."
recording: "https://vimeo.com/1234163374"
source: "Pi-Squared (pisquared.theburnescenter.org), The Burnes Center for Social Change"
licence: "none stated"
---

# Anita McGahan in conversation with Ashish Arora

Ashish Arora, Rex D. Adams Professor, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University · 8 October 2026

## About the guest

Ashish Arora is the Rex D. Adams Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. His research focuses on the economics of technology and technical change. He has written on software, biotechnology and chemicals, the economics of information security, and the role of patents and licensing in promoting technology startups. His current research focuses on the management of intellectual property and licensing in corporations, and innovation based entrepreneurship. He has held a wide range of important editorial positions at the most important journals in his field. Ashish has also advised the Secretary of Commerce, the National Academy of Sciences, and The Association for Computing Machinery. He has consulted to an extraordinary number of scientific and corporate boards, as well as to startups. Ashish holds a PhD from Stanford.

## Reflections from the interview

Ashish describes his early work on the division of labor in innovation, which grew out of his advisor Nathan Rosenberg's argument that specialized capital-goods firms (think James Watt, or the textile-machinery makers who carried that technology to Japan) drove both technical progress and its spread across countries. That led to his work on markets for technology, which he now describes as an early attempt to understand startup business-model choice: when an inventor should commercialize a technology themselves, and when they should license it or sell components to others. UOP, the refining-technology firm, is his example. He credits Bresnahan and Gambardella's insight that fragmenting the value chain makes sense when users are diverse ("broad markets, not deep markets"), and he points to modular, well-defined interfaces as a condition for these handoffs to work.

The second half covers why Silicon Valley has been so hard to replicate, and where his current thinking has gone. Arora says specialization doesn't require geographic clustering (the chemical industry shows this), and that trying to recreate Silicon Valley is quixotic. Better to build on a region's own strengths. His forthcoming book, *Inventing Prosperity*, demonstrates that the US system of specialized universities, startups and big firms works well in digital and life sciences, but poorly in sectors like new materials and energy, where integrating research inside large corporate labs (as in roughly 1930s–1980s America) worked better. He argues that losing that integration is hurting growth, and that universities' role needs to be rethought to fill the gaps. He closes by saying he keeps working because he enjoys learning, being humbled by what he doesn't know, and being surrounded by smart colleagues and students.

## Related resources

- [Ashish’s profile at Duke](https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/faculty/ashish-arora)
- [Ashish on Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=iNcqCNwAAAAJ&hl=en)
- [Ashish’s 1994 paper with Gambardella in Research Policy](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0167268194900558)
- [Ashish’s 2004 book on Markets for Technology](https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/3892/Markets-for-TechnologyThe-Economics-of-Innovation)
- [Ashish’s new book on inventing prosperity](https://academic.oup.com/book/63184)

## Recording

Video: https://vimeo.com/1234163374

## Category

[Where Do We Go From Here?](https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/category/where-next)

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Original page: https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/arora-ashish · Licence: none stated