Georgia Institute of Technology

Research Focus

Dan (Danny) Breznitz, (PhD, MIT) is an Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's Ernest Scheller Jr. College of Business and an Associate Professor by courtesy at The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and at the School of Public Policy. Breznitz has extensive experience in conducting comparative in-depth research of Rapid-Innovation-Based Industries and their globalization.

Dr. Breznitz's first book, Innovation and the State: Political Choice and Strategies for Growth in Israel, Taiwan, and Ireland (Yale University Press), won the 2008 Don K. Price for best book on Science and Technology and was a finalist for the 2007 best book of the year award in political science by ForeWord Magazine.

His second book (co-authored with Michael Murphree) The Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization, and Economic Growth in China has just been published by Yale University Press and was featured in The Economist, the New York Times, and Science among others.

Breznitz’s forthcoming book (co-editted with john Zysman) Can Wealthy Nations Stay Rich?, to be published by Oxford University Press, looks at the challenges and opportunities faced by Western economies in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the rapid changes in the global production system. In addition he has been the editor of two special issues and his work was published in journals and edited volumes across the social and natural sciences and engineering.

A video of Professor Breznitz talking about his research can be found here.

Breznitz is one of five young North American scholars to be selected as a 2008 Industry Study Fellow of the Sloan Foundation. Breznitz has also been an advisor on Science Technology and Innovation Policies for multinational corporations, international organizations, such as the World Bank, IFC, Fundación Chile, and the US-Israel Science and Technology Foundation, as well as local and national governments in the US, Asia, and Europe. He now leads several policy projects aiming to maximize the job creation benefits of innovation in North and Latin America, Europe, and Asia. In Georgia Tech he co-launched the Tech Connect initiative in the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2).

During 2006 Breznitz was a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and during 2007 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Bruegel Institute for International Economics, Brussels. His work is sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, the Samuel Neaman Institute for Advance Studies, the Bi-National Science Foundation (BSF), the NSF, Georgia Research Alliance, the Enterprise Innovation Institute, and The Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P).

A former founder and CEO of a small software company, Breznitz is also a research affiliate of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center. In addition, he is a senior researcher of the Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy Program (STIP) and the Academic Director of the Technology Cluster Initiative at EI2, as well as the director of the Globalization, Innovation, and Development program at the Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy (CISTP).

Before becoming overly-educated Breznitz used to have real hobbies, mainly theater (writing and acting), silversmithing, pottery, scuba diving, bartending, 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.