Faculty & Staff
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Sam Nunn School of International Affairs
781 Marietta Street, NW
Room 151
Atlanta, GA 30332 Phone: 404-894-4399
E-mail: tbvb@gatech.edu
Office Hours: By Appointment
Dan (Danny) Breznitz
Assistant Professor
Education
Ph.D., Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
B.A., Political Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Research Focus
Professor Breznitz’s research aims to utilize the comparative socio-political economy tool set to inquire into the choices states and societies have in pursuing industrial and economic development and wellbeing. His main focus has been on Industrial Innovation, Rapid-Innovation-Based industries, and their globalization. Breznitz has extensive fieldwork experience in different countries and different regions of the world, and takes the view that only by encouraging multi-method interdisciplinary research can we advance our understanding of the social reality.
Breznitz’ new book Innovation and the State: Political Choice and Strategies for Growth in Israel, Taiwan, and Ireland (Yale University Press) , has won the 2008 Don K. Price Award for best book in Science and Technology at APSA and was the finalist for the ForeWord Magazine 2007 best book of the year award in the political science category. The book looks at one of the most unexpected changes of the 1990s; the fact that firms in a number of emerging economies not previously known for high-technology industries moved to the forefront in new information technologies (IT). Surprisingly, from the perspective of comparative/international political economy theories, the IT industries of these countries use different business models and have been carving out different positions in the global IT production networks. Of these emerging economies, the Taiwanese, Israeli, and Irish have successfully nurtured the growth of their IT industries.
Contrary to popular belief, Breznitz’s new book argues that under the current conditions of intensified globalization, emerging economies have more options for developing their high technology industries than at any time since WWII. His research, based on more than four years of fieldwork, shows how state actions shaped the structure of these three IT industries and that the industry’s developmental path was influenced by four critical decisions of the state. Building on theories from political science, economic geography, and evolutionary economics, his work provides a basis to advance a theoretical framework for analyzing how different choices lead to long-term consequences and to the development of successful and radically different industrial systems.
Apart from residing in the physical world, the book is now part of Yale University Press wikibooks collection and available for download and comments under a creative commons agreement, thanks to the financial support of the Alfred P. Sloan foundation. In addition, you can hear Dan Breznitz discussing his book with Dave Levine host of the KZSU-FM (Stanford University) radio interview show and podcast Hearsay Culture.
In 2008, Breznitz has been selected to become a Sloan Industry Studies Fellow. Currently he is in the midst of a new multi-year multi-location research project looking at the different ways in which innovation translates (or not) into economic growth in the localities where it takes place. A first book manuscript arising from this project, currently titled The Run of The Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization, and Economic Growth in China (co-authored with Michael Murphree), is under preparation for review. The overall study is supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Office of the Chief Scientist in the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Employment of Israel, and The Neaman Institute for Advance Studies in Science and Technology. In the past, Breznitz’s research was also supported by the MacArthur Foundation and the Social Science Research Council , where he was also a fellow of the Corporation as a Social Institution Program.
A former founder and CEO of a small software company, Breznitz is also a research affiliate of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center where he has been involved in both the Globalization and the Local Innovation Systems projects. In addition, he is the director of the Globalization, Innovation and Development program at The Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy (CISTP), and a senior researcher at The Georgia Tech Program in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP) of the Enterprise Innovation Institute. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, he held a joint appointment with the School of Public Policy through academic year 2009.
Apart from books, Breznitz’s work has been published in both disciplinary and multidisciplinary academic journals, as well as chapters in edited volumes, and foreign language journals. His PhD dissertation won a Sloan Industry Studies Best Dissertation Award in 2005, and was part of the Herman E. Krooss Prize Panel of best dissertations in Business History in the 2006 Business History Conference meeting. During 2006, Breznitz was a visiting scholar at Stanford University Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Before becoming overly-educated, Breznitz used to have real hobbies, mainly theater, silversmithing, pottery, and football (soccer in Americanish), influenced by his current environment he concentrates in doing badly in virtual ones, losing magnificently (and consistently) in both strategy and football management games.