Government Policy and Technological Innovation: Where Do We Stand and Where Should We Go?

This paper is addressed to two questions: (1) Does the existing state of knowledge within the body of social science research provide an adequate information base for making decisions about public policies that affect technological change, and (2) What additional research might prove especially fruitful in its contribution to understanding the relationships between policy and innovation? In discussing these issues, every attempt will be made to push the existing state of knowledge as far as possible with respect to policy implications. Some of the propositions put forth are reasonably well established theoretically or empirically, but others should be accorded the status of unproved but plausible inferences.