I hope the chapters up to this point have convinced you that economists and their ideas have made important contributions to the world of business and to the general economy. I now want to engage in a bit of crystal ball gazing and look ahead to additional ways that already developed economic ideas (and thus on the shelf) are waiting to be commercially exploited, either directly by entrepreneurs or established firms, or by policy makers at multiple levels of government, in which case the ideas would help establish additional platforms for many new firms to get started or existing firms to branch into new lines of business.
I necessarily have to be selective so, given my own limitations, I will stick to those ideas with which I am most familiar.
The book concludes with some ruminations on the future of the economics profession itself. Economists will continue to be important, but their field will change and possibly meld with other disciplines. Economists will continue to theorize about, participate in, and be affected by what goes in the real world and the explosion of Big Data will help them do it.