Collaborative Research: Science Policy Research Report: Government Brokerage of Innovation Networks

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Federal agencies offer American innovators at least two different sources of support: first, seed money and consulting services that would be all but inaccessible to early stage entrepreneurs at competitive market prices; and second, introductions to potential partners in collaborative networks. Given that innovation demands collaboration as well as competition, the latter contributions are no less important than the former. But they are decidedly less well known and understood. This is partly because federal efforts to build collaborative networks tend to occur early in the process, before innovations come to market and capture the public's imagination; and partly because they are informal, and public officials have an incentive to downplay their informal contributions, which tend to go unmeasured and unrewarded by their agencies, and highlight their formal roles, like offering small firms and start-ups low-cost finance and consulting services. The unintended consequence of this oversight, however, is that federal efforts to build innovation networks are hard to document and duplicate. By evaluating the extent and importance of the federal government's role in network-building, this research report considers the development of new mandates, metrics, and incentives that will encourage beneficial brokerage by public officials, innovation by their private counterparts, and prosperity in the country as a whole. The report draws a distinction between two types of brokers: middlemen, who are paid to transfer goods or services between unrelated parties and thus depend on fees; and catalysts, who build mutually beneficial relationships between unrelated parties free of charge and thus depend on external (e.g., government) support. It gauges the extent and importance of catalyst brokerage in federal innovation institutions by means of a systematic comparison of the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Small Business Innovation Research program, among others. And if offers policy recommendations designed to foster catalyst brokerage, where valuable, at low (or no) cost--including changes to the staffing, programming, and evaluation of federal agencies and programs.