The Center for an Urban Future has finally released the long-awaited study of the City’s innovation sectors, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation through the NYC-focused civic program managed by Ted Greenwood. At the City Futures website you’ll find both a full study, and an appendix with an “index” of innovation indicators.
I can scarcely provide an impartial review, since I’ve been involved with this project from its earliest stages. I provided commentary to Sloan prior to the award and then served as an advisor (relax: unpaid) to co-authors Jonathan Bowles and Jim O’Grady through repeated drafts. However, if you’re prepared to accept admittedly self-interested commentary, I think this report hits the nail right on the head: what has stood in the way of New York City’s emerging as a technology center whose standing is consonant with its research preëminence is a series of primarily cultural issues. Go read it and tell me in the comments or by any other means if you think I’m wrong.
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This summer, I will be changing my status with the Technology Partnership Practice at Battelle Memorial Institute, where I have been a part-time employee for more than a dozen years. I have informed Battelle that I will resign that status on August 21st and focus instead on my independent consulting. I hope to be able still to do one or two larger projects for TPP each year, but as an independent contractor. Changing status from employee to affiliated consultant will allow me to focus more intently on my clients, including but not limited to the Business Incubator Association of New York State (other representative clients from recent years here). And it will become easier for me to manage and juggle my various assignments, without the very specific conflict-of-interest concerns that come with being an employee of a large and complex organization.
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I’m a friend of science and of government funding for scientific research (though I do insist that these are not the same thing). I spend much of my professional life explaining and advocating the very economic arguments for research funding laid out nicely in President Obama’s recent speech at the National Academy of Sciences. This is a thematically coherent statement of philosophy, likely to go down as a seminal document in the history of the administration, though in substance it contains little not already embraced on a bipartisan basis and telegraphed in dollars in the stimulus bill, the FY 2009 “omnibus” appropriation, and the FY 2010 budget, which is still in “outline” stage as of this writing.
The headline, I suppose, is a commitment to achieve a “societal” level of R&D of 3% of GDP, up from the most recently measured 2.57% and exceeding the 2.9% registered at the height of the Sputnik-fired space race. Societal R&D means all activities (basic, applied, development), all funders (federal, industrial, state, and philanthropic), and all performers (government, university and industry). As you might expect, there’s a complex interplay among funders and performers, cross-cut by research type. To understand the distribution of funding across these dimensions, see materials available from the NSF Division of Science Resource Statistics, including the masterful annual summary in Science and Engineering Indicators.
Since the government component of R&D is the only one the President and Congress can directly control, and since the thematic emphasis is on civilian R&D, what this comes down to is a theoretical justification for the 10-year doubling of the research budgets for the physical science agencies (NSF, NIST and DOE) — analogous to what was done for NIH in the 1990s and already authorized for these other three agencies in the America COMPETES Act but not until now committed to in a presidential budget.
On the plus side, the president’s speech evinced a clear understanding of the positive externalities of basic R&D that cause industry to under-invest in it, and which leave basic science an obligation of government worldwide: Most of the G8 nations typically achieve a rate of societal R&D of at least 2% of GDP, again with private investments in applied and development work supplemented by substantial government-funded contributions to basic research. However, I grimaced a bit at several elements:
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The ARRA ‘bump’ in S&T spending and the long-term hazards of doubling
In an earlier post, I had promised some additional thoughts about unintended consequences of the 10-year doubling of the federal budget for research and development in the physical sciences, a policy which was embedded in President Obama’s FY 2010 budget outline.
The federal fiscal year 2010 is under way this month, but as should be no surprise, as of today we don’t have anything like a signed set of appropriations bills.
What we do know is that we’re about half a year into the S&T components of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and judging by the press releases streaming from our major research universities and proud governors, the money is beginning to flow.
No university I know is turning down the chance to apply for ARRA or “stimulus act” funding, but what is not widely understood is that there is some apprehension in the academic community about this.
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