Mastering a New Role Shaping Technology Policy for National Economic Performance (1993) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
A New Mission for U.S. Technology
A New Mission for U.S. Technology
Pages 91-109
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From page 91... ...
technology enterprise now and in the near future is to work with other elements of the national economy to arrest and reverse the recent relative decline of U.S. economic performance and lay the foundation for sustained national economic prosperity into the next millennium.
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From page 92... ...
· Local and regional clusters of industrial activity and the associated human, physical, and social capital (accumulated work force skills and knowhow, financial and educational institutions, supporting legal and regulatory structures, supplier and distributor networks, etc.) will continue to play a major role in the competitive economic performance of nations.
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From page 93... ...
4. Create a strong institutional framework for federal technology policy in support of national economic development, and integrate the planning and implementation of federal technology policy with that of national domestic and foreign economic policy.
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From page 94... ...
RECOMMENDED POLICY ACTIONS As first steps toward each of these four overriding goals, the committee recommends a limited number of specific, priority policy actions and guidelines. Goal 1: Foster the timely adoption and effective use of commercially valuable technology throughout the U.S.
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From page 95... ...
Expand the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Manufacturing Technology Centers program and State Technology Extension Program as a first step toward this objective.3 RECOMMENDATION 2: Support experimentation with a wide range of public and private initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels to increase the quantity and improve the quality of school-to-work transition programs and of job-related training and continuing education for the nation's nonsupervisory work force. Such initiatives could include expanded support for apprenticeship programs, vocational training programs, cooperative work-study programs, training consortia, and training demonstration projects and outreach programs, as well as the development of training certification and standards schemes.
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From page 96... ...
An expanded federal role in industrial modernization should be defined in close collaboration with state governments and private-sector organizations that are, or should be, involved in the process. In particular, federal initiatives such as the MTC program should not seek to replace existing public- and private-sector providers of industrial modernization services, but rather to serve as a "reference librarian" or "broker" for their services, to help them learn from each other, and to stimulate local initiatives to increase the density in coverage of modernization services nationwide.
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From page 97... ...
Policy actions to achieve Goal 2: RECOMMENDATION 4: Replace the current incremental Research and Experimentation (R&E) Tax Credit with a permanent tax credit on the total annual R&D expenditures of a company to encourage an increase in the level and the stability of industrial R&D activity across business cycles.
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From page 98... ...
Rely on industry leadership and involvement in project initiation and design, and on significant private-sector cost sharing to ensure commercial relevance. Options include expansion of the Advanced Technology Program and the Small Business Innovation Research program, public funding of additional private-sector managed industrial consortia like SEMATECH, creation of an independent federal Civilian Technology Corporation,~3 and significant expansion of NIST's measurement, standards, and testing activities.~4 The committee believes that these three courses of policy action should form the core of the federal government's response to the nation's civilian R&D challenge.
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From page 99... ...
The recent proliferation of Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) between federal laboratories and private companies or consortia may help some of the participating federal laboratories develop greater competence in industrially relevant work.
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Examples include the international fellowship programs and the Japanese Technology Evaluation Program (JTEC) in the National Science Foundation and the Japanese Technical Literature Service and the U.S.-Iapan Manufacturing Technology Fellowship program in the Department of Commerce.
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From page 101... ...
This may include unilateral actions, such as countering another government's trade-distorting R&D subsidies with its own R&D subsidies rather than resorting to retaliatory tariffs or quotas.25 Goal 4: Create a strong institutional framework for federal technology policy in support of national economic development, and integrate the planning and implementation of federal technology policy with that of national domestic and foreign economic policy. The federal government's response to the technology and competitiveness challenges facing the nation's economy and its civilian technology enterprise has been inadequate.
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From page 102... ...
Although many of these programs have been judged successful in their own right, they are ad hoc and limited, do not serve as a basis for learning by experience, and are largely peripheral to the concerns and interests of the federal government's principal domestic and foreign economic policy agencies. In recent years there has been some movement in the federal government to improve coordination of federal technology policy initiatives among the diverse federal agencies through the revitalized Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering, and Technology, administered by the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
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From page 103... ...
The committee strongly believes that as Congress and the administration address this institutional challenge, their principal concern should be with bringing technology most effectively to bear in pursuit of national economic development, not with advancing and diffusing technology in and of itself. For this reason, the committee recommends against institutional solutions that do not include strong linkages between technology policy and other domains of domestic and foreign economic policy.
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From page 104... ...
These include NIST's Manufacturing Technology Centers (MTC) program and State Technology Extension Program (STEP)
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The committee considers the 10 "best practices" for industrial modernization programs distilled by Shapira et al.
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From page 106... ...
commercial technology base, efforts to expand significantly the funding of "dual-use" technology development by DARPA, a tenfold expansion of NIST's relatively modest ATP program (currently funded at $6 million) , and the establishment of a civilian technology corporation (a government-financed venture capital corporation)
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From page 107... ...
3382) "to establish an independent government Civilian Technology Corporation to support the efforts of American industry in the development of key technologies of the future." These bills proposed that a newly established CTC be funded at a level of $5 billion and be authorized to make technology development awards (in the form of grants, cooperative agreements, or contracts)
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From page 108... ...
Another way in which the federal government currently supports industrially relevant "infrastructural" research and development is through the Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) between private companies and federal laboratories.
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From page 109... ...
22. These initiatives should be viewed as a complement to the committee's final recommendation for the establishment of an institutional focus for federal technology policy in support of national economic development; see pp.
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