William B. Bonvillian

A new strategy for energy innovation

The US government must make the Department of Defense a key customer for energy technologies and make greenhouse-gas reductions a public good, say John Alic, Daniel Sarewitz, Charles Weiss and William Bonvillian.

Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors

The American economy faces two deep problems: expanding innovation and raising the rate of quality job creation. Both have roots in a neglected problem: the resistance of Legacy economic sectors to innovation. While the U.S. has focused its polices on breakthrough innovations to create new economic frontiers like information technology and biotechnology, most of its economy is locked into Legacy sectors defended by technological/economic/political/social paradigms that block competition from disruptive innovations that could challenge their models. Americans like to build technology covered wagons and take them out west to open new innovation frontiers; we dont head our wagons back east to bring innovation to our Legacy sectors. By failing to do so, the economy misses a major opportunity for innovation, which is the bedrock of U.S. competitiveness and its standard of living. Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors uses a new, unifying conceptual framework to identify the shared features underlying structural obstacles to innovation in major Legacy sectors: energy, air and auto transport, the electric power grid, buildings, manufacturing, agriculture, health care delivery and higher education, and develops approaches to understand and transform them. It finds both strengths and obstacles to innovation in the national innovation environments - a new concept that combines the innovation system and the broader innovation context - for a group of Asian and European economies. Manufacturing is a major Legacy sector that presents a particular challenge because it is a critical stage in the innovation process. By increasingly offshoring production, the U.S. is offshoring important parts of its innovation capacity. Innovate here, produce here, where the U.S. took all the gains of its strong innovation system at every stage, is being replaced by innovate here, produce there, which threatens to lead to produce there, innovate there. To bring innovation to Legacy sectors, authors William Bonvillian and Charles Weiss recommend that policymakers focus on all stages of innovation from research through implementation. They should fill institutional gaps in the innovation system and take measures to address structural obstacles to needed disruptive innovations. In the specific case of advanced manufacturing, the production ecosystem can be recreated to reverse jobless innovation and add manufacturing-led innovation to the U.S.s still-strong, research-oriented innovation system. Available in OSO:

Two Revolutions in Learning

The dazzling promise of affordable, high-quality, globally accessible online courses has renewed attention to learning and teaching. The opportunity to realize the full potential of so-called MOOCs (massively open online courses) may reside in a parallel, yet often unconnected, revolution in learning. Applying our understanding of undergraduate learning to online environments will build their educational value, while the scale and speed of data generation from MOOCs can accelerate research on learning. Approached iteratively, the outcomes can be transformative.

Legacy sectors: barriers to global innovation in agriculture and energy

The US national innovation system has a dual structure: part suited to rapid innovation, and part stubbornly resistant to change. The complex, established ‘Legacy sectors’ that resist change, particularly disruptive innovation, share common features that obstruct the market launch of innovations, over and above the ‘valley of death’ and other obstacles that have been the traditional focus of innovation policy. Innovations in Legacy sectors must penetrate a well-established and well-defended technological/economic/political/social paradigm that favours existing technology, characterised by (1) ‘perverse’ subsidies and price structures that create a mismatch between the incentives of producers and broader social goals, such as environmental sustainability, public health and safety, and geopolitical security; (2) established infrastructure and institutional architecture that imposes regulatory hurdles or other disadvantages to new entrants (3) market imperfections beyond those faced by other innovations: network economies, lumpiness, economies of scale, split incentives, needs for collective action, and transaction costs (4) politically powerful vested interests, reinforced by public support, that defend the paradigm and resist innovations that threaten their business models (5) public habits and expectations attuned to existing technology and (6) an established knowledge and human resources structure adapted to its needs. Beyond these obstacles, more socially desirable technologies that are driven by environmental or other non-market considerations must overcome the lack of agreed replacement standards against which putative alternatives can be judged. We have developed a new, integrative analytic framework for categorising the obstacles to market launch faced by Legacy sectors, and earlier applied this method to energy, health delivery, the long-distance electric grid, building, and air transport. In energy especially, the requirement for innovation is sufficiently urgent that large-scale domestic and collaborative international research should take place even at the cost of possible competitive disadvantage and even if it is some time before the USA adopts carbon charges and thereby puts pressure on the prevailing paradigm of fossil fuel use. We now extend this method to sustainable agriculture. American paradigms in agriculture and in energy are exported worldwide, delaying the development and spread of needed innovations that are not consistent with them. Foreign manufacturers wishing to enter US markets must suit their products in these sectors to American paradigms, while American exports of technology may be insufficiently cost conscious or respectful of environmental sustainability. Developing countries are technology takers and suffer from asymmetric innovative capability. They need to choose sources of technology best suited to their situation. India and China constitute new competitive threats, but also represent ‘innovative developing countries’ that have large domestic markets in which they are launching innovations aimed at their lower income populations.

Advanced Manufacturing Policies and Paradigms for Innovation

U.S. innovation is heavy on early-stage R&D; it requires additional focus on manufacturing stages. Manufacturing in the United States is usually not pictured as part of the innovation process. This is a fragmented, disconnected view; innovation demands to be looked at as a system, from early-stage research through production. In contrast, Germany has a culture of engineering and Japan of artisanship and quality that embrace histories of production innovation and manufacturing success. Both nations have higher-wage and higher-cost manufacturing sectors than the United States, yet they have run major trade surpluses in manufactured goods, whereas the United States has run large deficits (1, 2).

Advanced Manufacturing: A New Policy Challenge

In 2016 the political system experienced significant disruption in part due to a working class voting block suffering from a long decline in American manufacturing, which became particularly acute in the decade of the 2000s. Manufacturing employment fell by one-third in this period, 64,000 factories closed, manufacturing capital investment and output suffered, and the productivity rate dropped. The U.S. had been systematically shifting production abroad, and experts began to realize as the next decade began that the decline in its production capability was starting to affect its innovation capacity — which had long been viewed as its core economic strength.

Global obstacles to disruptive innovation in sustainable agriculture and energy

The U.S. national innovation system has a dual structure: part suited to rapid innovation, and part stubbornly resistant to change. The complex established “legacy” sectors (CELS) that resist change share common features that obstruct the market launch of innovations, beyond the “valley of death” and other obstacles that have been the traditional focus of innovation policy.

A Supply Side Policy for U.S. Technological Innovation in Energy

The environmental and geopolitical costs of Americas addiction to fossil fuels make a major federal program to stimulate innovation in energy technology justifiable and essential. Given the central role of energy in the economy and the variety of new technologies needed, this program will need to approach the dimensions of a major military transformational effort. It must go beyond research and development to include all aspects of the innovation process, and should be technology neutral as far as possible, consistent with the need for measures to overcome obstacles specific to particular technologies.