The United States of America (USA) is embarking on the development and application of a new model for the management of spectrum. This model has evolved through more than a decade of academic, policy, and economic concept development and analysis. It has now been embraced by sufficient major participants in the wireless ecosystem to achieve the critical mass to succeed. Although this model is focused on spectrum management, it has significant implications on the broader questions of wireless architecture, the structure of wireless service models, and even the nature of the wireless industry itself.

As the title suggests, this book is about the intersection of spectrum and innovation. There is a fundamental linkage between the flexible availability of spectrum, and the ability of entrepreneurs and innovators to create and deploy new technology, business models, and services. Therefore, we consider spectrum policy from the perspective that it should effectively provide spectrum to the services that require it, and at the same time, ensure that the operation of the spectrum mechanism does not fossilize the industries and services it supports. Spectrum policy that focuses primarily on the technical protection of incumbents will inevitably end up primarily protecting the business and technical models of those same incumbents.

While many topics in spectrum management and wireless have a rich literature, the rapid growth of the three-tier concept has not yet created an extensive base of either rationale or descriptive material. I believe there was a need to create a single work that is inclusive of the ideas that had been developed, and the actions that had been taken in the concept's short history. Second, the available documentation, mostly consisting of government regulations, reports, and legal filings, is deficient in establishing the rationale for many aspects of, and objections to, three-tier spectrum, and do not address the link between this regime and the creation of innovation-friendly spectrum policies. From an implementation perspective, there was no source of context describing what the real-world implementations of these concepts were, and could be.