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Policies that predict and direct innovative research might seem to be a practical impossibility, says David H. Guston, but social sciences point to a solution.
Innovation policy could be seen as an oxymoron. Like an 'open secret', or 'jumbo shrimp' - which the late comedian George Carlin compared to 'military intelligence' - the words just don't go together. Innovation policy evokes a tension. How does one predict and direct something that is by nature unpredictable and, by necessity, often undirected?
The tension in innovation policy runs deeper than word play, of course. Policies are made too late to change the past that necessitated them and too early to understand the future they are meant to shape. Innovation sparks the difference between that past and future. Policies are incremental, but the goals of innovation often tend toward the revolutionary. An explicit goal of recent initiatives in nanoscience, for example, has been to usher in "the next industrial revolution"1. That is about as non-incremental as one could imagine, given that the transformations associated with steam power and information technology affected both industrial organization, and every aspect of social and family life, language and art, politics, warfare and more.
Innovation policy should encourage a dynamic scientific enterprise to contribute to identifiable social outcomes, such as in areas of health, energy and the environment. But research occasionally generates radical changes that are unpredictable and often not associated with those pre-defined social goals. Nations invest in research for social purposes that are often thwarted by the nature of the research process itself. For example, investment in health research may return many high-quality scientific papers, but less in terms of affordable and accessible improvements in health care. Innovation policies for nanotechnology embody these contradictions.
Research initiatives
The US National Nanotechnology Research and Development Act of 2003 authorizes a National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) to coordinate about US$1.5 billion in research across some two dozen agencies. Currently in revision before Congress, the act emphasizes commercialization for international competitiveness as a driving rationale on one hand, while requiring research into societal impacts on the other2. Interestingly, the societal research promoted by the NNI may provide ways to address the contradictions inherent to innovation policy.
The NNI has funded research to develop 'anticipatory governance'3,...