Category: Technology Policy

The battles that began in the 1970s produced “institutional innovations” across the landscape of academic science and industrial research. These innovations were not limited to top-down actors, but also infused bottom-up activism – and state and local experimentation – that…

Technological and policy elites are often exceptionally good at seeing two dimensions of change: how fast and in which direction. What they too often flatten is the third dimension: public value. Something about the current debate over artificial intelligence felt…

The OSTP report presents itself as a fundamental rethinking of the linear model of innovation, ignoring that the system has been adapting to the inadequacies of that model for over half a century. Don E. Kash was about the age I…

Cracks in the Wall, Bridges Over Troubled Waters A recent LinkedIn post from the Democracy R&D Network made me think about an old problem—the dilemma of a science policy boundary spanner. The post referenced our recent Nature Commentary, which argued that “deliberation is…

For nearly eighty years, American science policy has lived under the shadow of a single idea: that scientific progress depends on insulating scientists from politics. In 1945, Vannevar Bush’s report Science, the Endless Frontier argued that if government funded basic…

One year in, I still can’t shake off this WSJ headline: “What’s Wrong With the Economy? It’s You, Not the Data.” Back then, many Americans believed that the economy and their finances were worse than they really were. Now that…

On April 3, 2019, South Korean carrier SK Telecom claimed to have launched the first 5G mobile network by activating the connection to six celebrities representing Korea. The launch was reportedly rushed forward by two days in order to beat…

At the end of February, while many people were intensely following Michael Cohen’s testimony before Congress, about 40 people packed a small room in the Cannon House Office Building to discuss the revival of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA).…