0.12 The bush-41 years: 1989-93  (Page 7/8)

National innovation systems

Bromley’s recollections of his Bush administration years contain not one mention of the word “innovation.” Bromley, op. cit . Well before the end of the Clinton administration, however, “innovation” would become a buzzword. During the 1980s, a handful of scholarshad begun to investigate ways in which innovation originated, grew, and ultimately succeeded or failed. In 1993, the economists Richard R. Nelson andNathan Rosenberg published their influential National Innovation Systems: A Comparative Analysis , which argued that university and industrial research, and the federal agencies that supporteduniversity research, were not the only institutions required for successful international competitiveness. Richard R. Nelson and Nathan Rosenberg, eds., National Innovation Systems: A Comparative Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Nor was a robust scientific research system a necessary or adequate foundation for competitiveness. What was required, they argued, was anational innovation policy.

No single event in the Bush administration led to this scholarly interest in national innovation systems. Rather, it had beenincreasingly clear since the late 1970s that the so-called linear model expounded in Science—the Endless Frontier was inadequate. That model assumed something like a conveyer belt, from whichthe results of basic research were picked up and used by applied researchers who passed them on for engineering development of a useful process or product.However, while the Bush report may have tacitly assumed that such products wouldeasily be commercialized or used for military purposes, it was clear that this did not happen automatically. Rather, there were other, heretofore neglectedfactors that had to be involved: e.g., the necessary capital to proceed from a pilot model to full-scale production, as well as marketing expenses. In short,research and development were insufficient. What was required was a broader innovation system that encompassed research and development, and morebesides.

Although no single event in the first Bush administration triggered these academic studies, these innovation studies had anotable impact on the formulation of science policy beginning in the early days of the succeeding Clinton administration.

In addition to rejecting the implicit Bush linear model, Nelson and Rosenberg noted that a problem originating inindustrial research often stimulated new basic research programs in universities. Moreover, they asserted, advances in commercial and militarytechnology very often relied not on breakthroughs in research but rather on incremental gains. Since the days of the Wright Brothers, for example, advancesin the aircraft industry often were based on incremental improvements gained through trial and error.

The study of innovation systems explores such questions as: How does technical advance proceed? What are the key processes?Who are the key actors? How does technical innovation translate into economic growth? Among the indispensable institutions in the United States are researchuniversities, industrial research laboratories, and the principal federal agencies that conduct and support R&D. Beyond that, links between industrial research laboratories and company operating units are essential; this is whyBell Labs, IBM, and Xerox all broke up their autonomous research labs in the 1980s and melded them with their operating units. Similarly, scholars came torecognize that tax and regulatory authorities played as vital a role in innovation systems as did direct federal R&D support.