National Academy of Sciences

National Academy of Engineering

Institute of Medicine

National Research Council

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit, self-perpetuating society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare. Upon the authority of the charter granted to it by the Congress in 1863, the Academy has a mandate that requires it to advise the federal government on scientific and technical matters. Dr. Bruce M. Alberts is president of the National Academy of Sciences.

The National Academy of Engineering was established in 1964, under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences, as a parallel organization of outstanding engineers. It is autonomous in its administration and in the selection of its members, sharing with the National Academy of Sciences the responsibility for advising the federal government. The National Academy of Engineering also sponsors engineering programs aimed at meeting national needs, encourages education and research, and recognizes the superior achievements of engineers. Dr. Wm. A. Wulf is president of the National Academy of Engineering.

The Institute of Medicine was established in 1970 by the National Academy of Sciences to secure the services of eminent members of appropriate professions in the examination of policy matters pertaining to the health of the public. The Institute acts under the responsibility given to the National Academy of Sciences by its congressional charter to be an adviser to the federal government and, upon its own initiative, to identify issues of medical care, research, and education. Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg is president of the Institute of Medicine.

The National Research Council was organized by the National Academy of Sciences in 1916 to associate the broad community of science and technology with the Academy’s purposes of furthering knowledge and advising the federal government. Functioning in accordance with general policies determined by the Academy, the Council has become the principal operating agency of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering in providing services to the government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities. The Council is administered jointly by both Academies and the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Bruce M. Alberts and Dr. Wm. A. Wulf are chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the National Research Council.

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The improved competitive performance of much of the U.S. industry in the 1990s derived from a combination of corporate strategies and public policies supportive of innovation, the latter including steady and conservative fiscal policy, economic deregulation, trade liberalization, relatively lenient antitrust enforcement, and the research investments of previous decades. These were the conclusions of an in-depth study of 11 manufacturing and service industries by the National Academies’ Board on Science Technology and Economic Policy (STEP) published in 1999 (National Research Council, 1999a, 1999b).

Although cautiously optimistic about the future performance of the economy, the STEP Board articulated four concerns that have continued to guide much of its work: the availability of skilled human capital, the implications for research and innovation of some aspects of the extension of intellectual property rights, the adequacy of public and private investment in long-range research, especially in the physical sciences and engineering, and the adequacy of measures and statistical data to inform policy making.

The STEP Board’s first effort to assess the utility and policy relevance of the government’s data on innovation was a February 1997 workshop sponsored by the Sciences Resource Studies Division (SRS) of the National Science Foundation and summarized in Industrial Research and Innovation Indicators (National Research Council, 1997). In 2001, a committee formed by the STEP Board to study shifts in the allocation of federal research expenditures during the 1990s recommended several improvements in the collection, classification, and analysis of data on research and devel-

opment (R&D) spending in both the private and public sectors (National Research Council, 2001). Another Academy panel recently reviewed the entire National Science Foundation portfolio of survey data on R&D and science and engineering personnel and recommended changes that would improve measurement of innovation (National Research Council, 2000b).

This volume is the summary of a second STEP workshop, chaired by board member Mark Myers, formerly chief technical officer of Xerox Corporation. The workshop explored how data on scientists, engineers, and other professionals—data on their training and skills, mobility and career paths, use of time, relationships across institutions and sectors, and productivity—can be used to illuminate aspects of innovation that current R&D, patent and other data, by themselves, do not fully capture.

In preparation for the meeting the STEP Board commissioned an exploratory paper by Paula Stephan, an economist at the Andrew Young School of Public Policy at Georgia State University. On November 23, 1999, the paper was presented to an audience of statisticians and economists, society and association representatives, government officials representing technical and statistical agencies and industrialists. Other presentations described applications of human resource data in research and the features of several federal government surveys containing human resource data. Participants also discussed ways to acquire and use new data and to link information from separate existing data sets.

The report does not present conclusions and recommendations of the STEP Board or of the Academies but does represent a faithful summary of the discussions of opportunities to improve understanding of industrial innovation and its outcomes through creative uses of information on professionals involved in the process.

The workshop was sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health.

This report has been reviewed in draft form by individuals chosen for their diverse perspectives and technical expertise, in accordance with procedures approved by the NRC’s Report Review Committee. The purpose of this independent review is to provide candid and critical comments that will assist the institution in making its published report as sound as possible and to ensure that the report meets institutional standards for objectivity, evidence, and responsiveness to the study charge. The review comments and draft manuscript remain confidential to protect the integrity of the deliberative process. We wish to thank the following individuals for their contributions to the review:

Michael Finn, Oak Ridge Associated Universities

Bradford Jensen, U.S. Census Bureau

Carlos Kruytbosch, National Science Foundation (Retired)

David Roessner, Georgia Institute of Technology

Kenneth Troske, University of Missouri-Columbia

Although the reviewers listed above have provided many constructive comments and suggestions, they were not asked to endorse the content of the report, nor did they see the final draft before its release. The review of this report was overseen by Robert McGuckin, The Conference Board, who was responsible for making certain that an independent examination of this report was carried out in accordance with institutional procedures and that all review comments were carefully considered. Responsibility for the final content of this report rests entirely with the authoring committee and the institution.

Dale Jorgenson,

Chairman

Stephen A. Merrill,

Executive Director

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