培育市场，促进转型创新

Table Of ContentsIntroductionThe Challenges Of Social InnovationHow Government Catalyzed Innovation In The PastThe Lessons Of Market-Making For Tech InnovationsAn Evolving Landscape Changes WhichTools Are Most EffectiveGetting Started: Practice The Art Of InnovationSeeding A Market Success: Nuclear PowerInnovations Require Different Roles To FlourishShifting R&D Spending Patterns Are Making Indirect ToolsMore Important For Technological InnovationsSeeding A Market Failure: Super Sonic TransportWho Plays What Role Changes With An Innovation’s StageThe Stage Of An Innovation Also ChangesWhich Tools Are Most EffectiveEven When Government Isn’t ‘Doing,’ It Has ARole To Play In Supporting Innovation 04060812182210142011152116 IntroductionIf you are reading this on a tablet orphone, take a minute to appreciatethose monuments of government-driveninnovation. Nearly every key technology inthose devices was created, funded or orderedby a government entity. We all know aboutGPS and the internet, but the world wideweb, touchscreen, lithium-ion batteries,and signal compression all emerged fromgovernment1. Even Siri began life as a DARPAproject before being spun off into its owncompany and later acquired by Apple2.But while these monuments to previousgovernment-catalyzed innovations still shapemodern life, government organizations oftenexperience difficulty in similarly catalyzing theinnovations that will shape tomorrow’s world.Today, many government agencies -andprivate companies- struggle to overcome the‘valley of death,’ keeping promising prototypesfrom full-scale adoption3. The challenge intransitioning technological innovations fromprototype funding to sources capable ofsupporting scale is well studied. While it isbeyond the scope of this paper to tackle thatproblem in detail, our research does pointtoward there being not one ‘valley of death’but several. The same barriers to scale applynot only to technological innovations but tosocial innovations too, and the problem is notjust transitions in funding, but transitionsin all critical roles. These barriers havecollectively made it quite difficult in particularto scale social innovations – thatis innovations with non-technologicalsolutions that address key societal needs fromhousing to healthcare to protecting naturalresources, and require complex cross-sectorcoordination to execute.04 This is doubly problematic because thebiggest problems of today demand bothtechnological and non-technologicalinnovations. Societal challenges such asclimate change or eroding public trust cannotbe solved by new technology tools alone.Rather, they will take new ideas and newtechnologies working together to improvepeople’s lives. Government still needs to playan important role in shaping and supportinginnovations to these massive problems. Butin today’s environment, where the privatesector has emerged as a dominant sourceof funding for both technological and socialinnovation, finding these solutions requiresgovernment to work in a more integrated,agile way with the private sector. To catalyzethe innovations of tomorrow, governmentneeds new tools today. Social innovations present unique challenges to those tryingto cultivate them. The transformations that are needed tosolve society’s largest challenges in the 21st are unlikely to besolved by technological innovations alone. Take some of thewicked problems in today’s world as an example. Problemssuch as the opioid crisis or affordability in higher educationall may include some element of technology. For instance,AI can help identify over-prescribers or at-risk populationsto ease the opioid crisis or virtual learning can help bringhigher education to a wider population4. But, even in thesecases, the technologies will only make meaningful impacton the problem when paired with social innovations aswell – new enforcement and diversion mechanisms in theopioid crisis and new business models and forms of studentsupport in higher education. The transformational innovationsof the future, then, will likely depend on catalyzing bothtechnological and social innovations. And while you canlook to your smartphone or air travel for evidence ofgovernment’s success in catalyzing technological innovations,there are fewer clear examples of social innovation.For any innovation to be successful, it needs measurableoutcomes – not just measurable inputs. This is almostdefinitional. After all, how can you determine if an innovationwas successful without reference to its outcomes? Onechallenge for social innovation is that outcomes are often notclear. For technological innovation, there are clear physicalphysical devices - or software - that are the outputs ofthe innovation process. Transistors come out of factories,microwave ovens appear on store shelves. For socialinnovations, it can be more difficult to identify what theright outcomes are. Take affordable housing as an example.“Ending homelessness” may be a good slogan, but it is notan achievable outcome for