Innovation strategy

摘要

Us President Barack Obama travelled to a struggling city in upper New York state last week to unveil a 22-page "Strategy for American Innovation". The Obama administration is genuinely interested in developing policies to foster innovation, but a close reading of the strategy indicates that it is just beginning to figure out how to do that.rnInnovation is a broad and amorphous, yet highly contested, area of policy. Federal efforts to spur "the development of new products, services, and processes" - the strategy document's definition of "innovation" - always provoke debates about the appropriate role of government, as well as charges from conservatives that programmes are being designed to "pick winners and losers".rnThe topic has been such a perennial political flashpoint that even choosing a name for such efforts is no simple matter. The Obama administration no doubt chose "innovation policy", in part, because it sounds hard to dispute - who could be against progress? - and it breaks from past nomenclature, such as the "industrial policy" of the 1980s or President Bill Clintons "technology policy", which did not succeed in keeping the conservatives at bay. The Obama phrase is also a quiet nod to the sometimes controversial field of "innovation economics", which argues that governments do need policies explicitly directed at promoting innovation; merely creating a healthy economic environment is not enough.