Innovation in Information Technology (2003) / Chapter Skim
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1. Innovation in Information Technology
1. Innovation in Information Technology
Pages 5-29
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From page 5... ...
The flow of ideas and peoplethe interaction between university research, industry research, and product development is amply evident. Figure 1 updates Figure 4.1 from the 2002 CSTB report Information Technology Research, Innovation, and E-Government.
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Atari, Nintendo, SGI, Pixar ARPANET, Aloha, Internet Pup DECnet, TCP/IP Rings, Hubnet Ethernet, Datakit, Autonet LANs, switched Ethernet Lisp machine, Stanford Xerox Alto Xerox Star, Apollo, Sun Engelbart / Rochester Alto, Smalltalk Star, Mac, Microsoft Berkeley, Caltech, MOSIS many Berkeley, Stanford IBM 801 SUN, SGI, IBM, HP FIGURE 1 Examples of government-sponsored IT research and development in the creation of commercial products and industries. Federally sponsored research lies at the heart of many of today's multibillion-dollar information technology industries industries that are transforming our lives and driving our economy.
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originally published in Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council, 1995, Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation's Information Infrastructure, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.
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It is important to remember that real-world requirements can change quickly. Although the end of the Cold War was interpreted by some as lessening the need for research,4 September 11, 2001, underscored research needs in several areas: system security and robustness, automatic natural language translation, data integration, image processing, and biosensors, among others areas in which technical problems are difficult to begin with, and may become harder when technology must be designed to both meet homeland security needs and protect civil liber3The idea that research in IT not only builds in part on research in physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, psychology, and other fields but also strongly influences them is consistent with what Donald Stokes has characterized in his four-part taxonomy as '~Pasteur~s Quadrant,, research: use- or application-inspired basic research that pursues fundamental understanding Such as Louis Pasteups research on the biological bases of fermentation and diseased.
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"Long-term" research refers to a long time horizon for the research effort and for its impact to be realized. Examples of innovations that required long-term research include speech recognition, packet radio, computer graphics, and internetworking.
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7Similarly, commercial developments in broadband cellular radio (which has become essentially wireless Internet access in third-generation wireless) are built in part on many decades of federally supported research into Code Division Multiple Access technology, signal processing for antenna arrays, error-correction coding, and so on.
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processors, the initial ideas came from industry, but the research that was essential to advancing these ideas came from government funding to universities. RISC was conceived at IBM, but it was not commercialized until DARPA funded additional research at the University of California at Berkeley and at Stanford University as part of its Very Large Scale Integrated Circuit (VLSI)
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In the case of integrated circuit (VLSI) design tools, research innovation led to products and then to major industrial markets.
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INNOVATION IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 13 have articulated the concept of "appropriability" to express the extent to which the results of an investment can be captured by the investor, as opposed to being available to all players in the market. The results of long-term, fundamental research are hard to appropriate for several reasons: they tend to be published openly and thus to become generally known; they tend to have broad value; the most important may be unpre
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Although individual industrial players may find it hard to justify research that is weakly appropriable, it is the proper role of the federal government to support this sort of endeavor (1,3~. When companies create successful new products using the ideas and workforce that result from federally sponsored research, they repay the nation handsomely in jobs, tax revenues, productivity increases, and world leadership (1,3~.
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Start-ups illustrate the critical role of government funding in building the foundations for innovative commercial investments. THE DISTINCTIVE CHARACTER OF FEDERALLY SUPPORTED RESEARCH The most important characteristic of successful government research activities is their breadth of scope both in their long time dimension and in their focus on activities that are potentially difficult to appropriate privately in their entirety.
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16 INNOVATION IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY dress security challenges adequately, government support for such research is especially important.ll CSTB's 2001 study on networked systems of embedded computers (7) sounds a similar theme (at p.
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Each company that is an Internet "player" will be tempted to diverge from the common standard if it looks possible to capture a large portion of it we have seen this during the past decade in protocols for transport, electronic mail, instant messaging, and many other areas (see Box 6~. However, a common, open standard maximizes overall social welfare as a result of the network externalities obtained from the larger market.
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technologies that foster the accommodation of multiple competitive service providers over facilities. Such open access-ready systems might not be a natural research and development target of large incumbent providers but will be the preferred form for a variety of public sector or public-private deployments.l3 Broadband: Bringing Home the Bits notes that federally funded research can complement the more proprietary-oriented industry approaches to innovation, whether in communications architecture or content.
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, but they also are byfar the most effective vehicle for technol~4The concentration of research in universities is particularly true for computer science research; industry played an important role in telecommunications research before the breakup of AT&T and the original sell Labs.
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Industry also contributes significantly to equipment but is usually attracted by existing research excellence and collaborations. Thus, by placing infrastructure in universities, the federal government directly and indirectly makes possible hands-on learning experiences for countless young engineers and scientists, as well as enabling university researchers to continue their work (1-6~.
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From page 23... ...
In contrast to NSF, for example which has a mandate to support a very broad research agenda "mission agencies" tend to focus on topics that appear to have the greatest relevance to their specific missions. Additionally, the early DARPA programs chose to concentrate large research awards in so-called centers of excellence (many of which over time have matured into some of the nation's leading university computer science programs)
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The program manager is responsible for initiating, funding, and overseeing research programs. The funding and management styles of program managers at DARPA during the 1960s and 1970s, for example, reflected an ability to marry visions for technological progress with strong technical expertise and an understanding of the uncertainties of the research process (1,3~.
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From page 26... ...
For example, while IT is at the core of a number of interdisciplinary programs (such as the multiagency Digital Libraries Initiative and NSF's Digital Government and Computing and Social System programs) , it takes more work to review proposals for interdisciplinary work and to assure its quality.
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Past advances fostered by federal funding leveraged the energies and wisdom of people who went from universities and industry into the government, for at least a limited period. It is ironic that their success has increased the incentives for researchers to stay in universities or to try their hand in industry instead of cultivating the field as program managers.
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From page 28... ...
For a discussion of government leadership and the importance of government funding of research as a policy tool, see Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council, 1996, The Unpredictable Certainty: Information Infrastructure Through 2000, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.
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From page 29... ...
A complex partnership among government, industry, and universities has made the United States the world leader in IT, and information technology has become essential to our national security and economic and social well-being. Turn-of-the-century turmoil and structural changes in IT industries have diminished their inherently limited capacity to support fundamental IT research.
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