Three-quarters of the potential pickup in productivity could come from “catch-up” improvements, with countries taking steps – modernizing their retail sectors, consolidating automobile production into a smaller number of larger factories, improving health-care efficiency, and reducing food-processing wastage – that have already proven effective elsewhere. The rest can come from technological, operational, and business innovations – for example, developing new seeds to increase agricultural yields, using new materials (such as carbon-fiber composites) to make cars and airplanes lighter and more resilient, or digitizing medical records.