What's Next for Technology Policy?

摘要

By the summer of 1991, there was no doubt that the Cold War was over and the United States was unchallenged militarily. But the nation's commercial high-tech industry was still facing a decade-old struggle to compete with innovative Japanese products of superior quality, lower cost, and faster time to market. How would the U.S. government respond? Would the shift from Cold War to hot competition lead to a national industrial policy that would enable the nation to secure the benefits of science? In 1988, President Reagan had signed the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act, which contained a radical change in public policy: the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), intended to promote high-tech commercial competitiveness. Managed by the Commerce Department's National Institute for Standards and Technology, ATP was designed to reduce the risk of private investment in innovations with great commercial promise by supporting cost-shared early-stage R&D projects. The first President Bush had permitted ATP to be funded at modest levels, and he had publicly endorsed the program's intent in half a dozen speeches, primarily on the advice of his science adviser, physicist D. Allan Bromley. After 14 months of adroit maneuvering by Bromley and his staff, the White House in 1990 issued a formal policy statement entitled "The U.S. Technology Policy," which proposed tripling the budget for ATP.