At the Speed of Irrelevance

CHAPTER 12At the Speed of Relevance

IF THERE IS ONE thing that the history of research and development teaches us, it is that an R&D system cannot be independent of the economic, social, political, and technological environments it operates in. In the United States alone, the country has developed through at least four R&D systems (Mowery and Rosenberg 1989). The first was the pre-World War II system where research and development were undertaken by large manufacturing firms that invested in labs. The federal government's participation in that system was minimal. Post–World War II a different system emerged, which was led by the federal government. The federal government not only financed research and acquired the output but also facilitated the creation of research centers and supported institutions and universities. The third R&D system evolved during the 1980s, which called for significant collaboration between academia, industry, and the government and where international research collaboration increased. The fourth R&D system developed during the Internet revolution and involved opening up R&D to individuals and small firms. Through open source and crowdsourcing, R&D in many areas became democratized. Each one of these systems was marked with its own environmental factors and was in response to the economic, social, political, and technological environments of its time.

Ignoring the environmental factors of the R&D and the related technological transformation leads to ...