Payoffs from government-sponsored R&D in the US and Japan

Abstract

This paper presents some significant issues and questions about the needs for and attempts at measuring the long-term outcomes and impacts of major national R&D programs. It also discusses important barriers to the flow from R&D inputs to social and economic impacts far downstream. One of the deficiencies of many of the periodic attempts to analyze this complex process is that they try to take too big a bite of the problem. They try to directly link the cost of R&D input resources at the far upstream end of the R&D process to far downstream economic and social impacts. This approach ignores many of the problems of identification, measurement, complexity, imputation, attribution, and parsing of outcomes at each stage. An approach to analysis and measurement of the flow is presented, based on several decades of research and consulting in these issues for a wide range of technical fields, government agencies, and industrial firms. Three specific examples are given, in the form of stage models, barriers/facilitators, and indicators/measures of outputs at each stage. They are based on analysis by the author and his colleagues of agricultural, environmental, and fire research, supported by major government agencies. The recommended approach to such analysis includes eight steps: 1) select key sectors of R&D supported by national governments; 2) Identify major transition stages in the R&D to market or application process; 3) Identify key barriers and facilitators along the flow; 4) Develop indicators and metrics for the outputs and impacts at each stage; 5) Develop relationships between the outputs and inputs at each stage; 6) Identify gaps and weak spots in the flow for each sector; 7) Recommend ways of dealing with the gaps and weaknesses; 8) Suggest approaches to monitoring short-term performance and long-term impacts.