Advanced Technology Program Challenges and Opportunities (1999) / Chapter Skim
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Panel I: History and Current Legislative Perspective on the ATP Program
Panel I: History and Current Legislative Perspective on the ATP Program
Pages 37-50
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From page 37... ...
project on Government-Industry Partnerships for the Development of New Technologies. The ATP is a prominent government-industry partnership that was founded as part of an explicit "national effort to help accelerate the commercialization of high-risk broad benefit enabling technologies with significant commercial implications." That is an ambitious goal, Mr.
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From page 38... ...
The trade deficit extended beyond traditional manufacturing goods to high-technology goods. A trade deficit in the hightechology sector had not existed since the Commerce Department began compiling figures for this sector in the 1960s.
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From page 39... ...
The seeds of the ATP were sown at least 25 years earlier during the Kennedy administration, which advocated the creation of a civilian industrial technology program whereby the government would fund a series of cooperative R&D programs to be operated by nonprofit institutions to strengthen the technology base of lagging sectors. Because that was a period of robust economic growth, problems in sectors such as electronics, autos, and steel were not foreseen.
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From page 40... ...
This embodied some of the recommendations of the Carter dialogue, including authorization of the establishment of centers of industrial technology with government funding to aid industry. The Reagan administration, however, did not fund these centers, but the authority still remains in the law.
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From page 41... ...
The Bush administration was deeply divided on the program: Some officials in the Commerce Department vigorously advocated the initiative, but powerful officials in the White House, such as Chief of Staff John Sununu and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Michael Boskin opposed the program. This result was that the program's funding rose slowly in the Bush Administration, to over $60 million annually by the end of the administration.
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From page 42... ...
We could imagine being in a meeting whose purpose was to decide ATP funding levels, and much of the discussion would have revolved around the incredible performance of the Japanese economy. Some characteristics of the Japanese economy would have been discussed, including how the Japanese government could influence or subsidize R&D investment and how the unique relationship between government and industry had enabled Japan to invest in long-term high-risk R&D at a greater rate than the United States could invest.
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From page 43... ...
Japanese economic growth, which averaged 3.4 percent per year during the l990s, would fall to an average 2.1 percent growth rate from 1990 to 1998. Japanese unemployment would more than double, and the Japanese stock market, as measured by the Nikkei Index, would fall during the late l990s to less than half its mid-1980s' level.
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From page 44... ...
1274 that address NIST are a change in the matching requirements for ATP a 60 percent match for all ATP grants except those for small businesses is part of the bill and language to ensure that ATP funds do not displace private capital. This is a reaction to numerous GAO reports finding that many ATP applicants were not searching for private capital before turning to ATP.
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From page 45... ...
In the early years of the program, these categories broke out largely along party lines, with Republican in the former, saying that government should not "pick winners and losers" and Democrats in the latter, saying that government should not subsidize big business. These alignments have shifted a bit, in that libertarians, who align themselves with Republicans, argue that neither industry nor government can be trusted.
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From page 46... ...
Rather, the ATP evaluations explore whether a particular project would have been undertaken without government funding and, if the project had been undertaken, whether the capital invested would have been put to better use in the private sector. Both questions are extremely difficult to answer and tend to draw the discussion into "religious debates among people of different articles of faith." That is why, concluded Mr.
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From page 47... ...
Barfield reiterated that he believed that ATP should encourage collaboration among companies so as to foster R&D dissemination and rarely, if ever, fund a single company. Moreover, the intellectual property protection afforded the private sector in the ATP projects should be rethought.
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From page 48... ...
It was apparent to congressional staff and others in the policy community that the Vannevar Bush notion of innovation, that is, the linear model in which innovation moves from basic science in the lab, to development, to the marketplace, was no longer appropriate. In searching for a program that would respond to quicker innovation cycles, drafters of the ATP decided to concentrate on generic technologies that affect entire industries.
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From page 49... ...
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE Dr. Wessner noted that world economic conditions had changed dramatically in the past 10 years; few would have guessed 10 years ago that the Japanese economy would suffer a severe and extended recession, and few might have guessed that the U.S.
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From page 50... ...
Dr. Richard Nelson of Columbia University asked panelists, especially congressional staffers, how the ATP has changed over its 10-year life.
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