The USA is widely acknowledged as the most innovative nation in the world. The size of US markets provides an advantage to the US innovation system. It allows US innovative businesses to grow large, delivering high returns from successful marketing or technological innovation. But the US Government plays a major role, perhaps greater than recognised, in shaping innovation. Research & Development activities in industries and universities, especially in defence-related technologies, life sciences and energy. It provided a powerful impetus to the development and commercialisation of new civilian technologies. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), created in 1958, remains instrumental in fostering these spillovers by developing technological initiatives, providing funding but also skills and management support to businesses, and providing a brokering function between university research, businesses and the public sector in high-risk high-reward areas of life sciences, physical sciences and engineering. US federal research funding for academic and business institutions is distributed by governmental departments and agencies, including the Department of Defence (DoD) the Department of Energy (DoE), the National Science Foundation. Over the last couple of decades, faced with more intense foreign competition, more limited financial resources and the growth of regional US clusters, federal policymakers launched more decentralised programmes spread across a number of agencies. These programmes sought to strengthen civilian technological capabilities by subsidising and promoting joint research, encouraging collaboration between US universities and industry in technology development, and supporting collaboration between US industry and the federal laboratories. In the late 1980s programmes such as the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS), the semiconductor research consortium SEMATECH, the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) of the Department of Commerce, and the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Centers all represented a new technology policy and relied on expanded funding from the private sector
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 02:10:09 +0000
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