Thoughts on Technology Policy

Governments seeking to develop as quickly as possible will seek to import technology, technology intensive products and technology services. They also seek to strengthen technological capacity. These objectives are somewhat in conflict, as countries (and people) learn by doing.Thus policy makers should seek a balance between more now and more later. One trick is that in the process of contracting for technology, policies can call for the development of technological capacity as part of the deal. Domestic content requirements, and requirements to transfer know-how as well as machinery exemplify the approach.

A seemingly similar policy approach is, as a colleague pointed out, quite different. Import substitution policies call for the substitution of locally available inputs for imported ones. Generally, however, countries are thought to progress faster if they take full advantage of comparative advantage, maximizing production and export of products for which they have a comparative advantage and importing those for which it doesn’t. The most economically successful countries tend to be those that import, add value and export; that have a high ratio of international trade to GDP.

There is a general problem of getting the results of R&D from the laboratory to the user. People talk about technology push and demand pull. Frequently development practioners are skeptical about technology push, but it seems to me that many innovations – polaroid photography, xerography, integrated circuits, personal computers – all came from technology push. Again, there shoudl be a balance between the two, ideally with communications between researchers and the users of the reasearch, negotiating a solution that satisfies both.

The issue is how to institutionalize the interface between industrial laboratory and factory floor, between epidemiologist and public health official, between university laboratory and students, and even more problematical between a laboratory in one organization or sector and users in another organization or sector. I suggest that the internalization of the R&D lab in the indistrial organization has allowed the experience in organizational design, development and management to be applied to the institutionalization. So too does internalization of the research organization within a governmental organization allow the machinery of public administration to be applied to the institutionalization.

The link between university laborary and graduate education is generally regarded as strong in the United States and weak in the former Soviet Union, in part because laboratories were integrated within universities in the United States and outside the universities (in Academies of Sceince in the Soviet Union. Yet there are examples of effective institutionalization of links that allow graduate education in government laboratory maintaining the organizational identities and independence of both. This seems difficult, but possible. Considering the problem as one of institutional design and bringing the bodies of knowledge from the social sciences to bear seems useful.

There have been many approaches used in recent decades in the United States to instituionalize linkages between university laboratories and industrial firms. One of the best seems to be the old standby of allowing faculty to consult with industry, while making research a formal part of the faculty responsibility. The Bahy-Dole Act created incentives for university researchers to obtain and commericalize patents stemming from their research. Government grant programs supporting the creation of university centers serving consortia of firms with pre-competitive research and technology have been successful. The creation of university incubators, and university technology transfer offices seems to have worked in many places. In Mexico, a network of technology transfer businesses was created via government contracts.

So long for now, as I am taking a couple of days off!