Presentation Abstract

An overlooked and underestimated feature in the design of the governmental programs and institutions that support the U.S. science and technology-based innovation system is "political design," as opposed to the factor generally exclusively considered, policy design. There have been four major innovation organization policy moments for the U.S. government, driven by the demands of both politics and technology since 1945: 1) the immediate postwar period where the Cold War helped drive the formation and expansion of a plethora of science agencies, 2) the Sputnik aftermath with the formation of DARPA and NASA and scaled up funding for science, and 3) the competitiveness era "valley of death" programs of the 1980's, and recently, 4) an energy technology shift driven by energy security and climate demands. Some are advocating a fifth - advanced manufacturing, with new innovation programs now being discussed. This talk will look at the evolution of the role and organization of the U.S. R&D agencies and evaluate the political design issues underlying these federal innovation institutions, including from a perspective of whether the political design model is consciously structured to be supportive as opposed to contradictory to the policy design.