James Bessen (born 1950) is an economist who has been a Lecturer at Boston University School of Law since 2004, and was previously a software developer and CEO of a software company. Bessen was also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Bessen researches the economics of innovation, including patents and economic history. He has written about software patents with

Eric Maskin Eric Stark Maskin (born December 12, 1950) is an American economist and mathematician. He was jointly awarded the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism ...

, arguing that they might inhibit

innovation Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a new or changed enti ...

rather than stimulate progress. With Michael J. Meurer, he wrote ''Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk'' as well as papers on patent trolls. His book ''Learning by Doing: The Real Connection Between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth'' argues that major new technologies require new skills and knowledge that are slow and difficult to develop, affecting jobs and wages. Bessen developed the first

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online ...

program at a community newspaper in Philadelphia in 1983. He established and ran a company, Bestinfo, to sell that program commercially. In 1993, Bestinfo was sold to

Intergraph Intergraph Corporation was an American software development and services company, which now forms part of Hexagon AB. It provides enterprise engineering and geospatially powered software to businesses, governments, and organizations around the ...

. He graduated from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

References

External links

* 1958 births Living people 21st-century American economists Boston University School of Law faculty American technology chief executives Harvard University alumni {{US-economist-stub