I’m en route to San Antonio to give the keynote speech at an internal meeting at the Brooke Army Medical Center.
Along with dealing with getting my presentation slides through the door (no flash drives! no laptops!), this has me thinking about the role of government versus private enterprise in fostering innovation.
There’s a role for both, of course. Government agencies and research centers can afford to have a vastly longer timeframe for seeing a new development through to fruition. Look at the Internet. Went online as ARPANET in 1969. Took decades to start to fulfill its commercial promise.
Businesses have to move quickly or die. That’s a blessing and a curse. There’s every incentive to make efficient use of resources, especially at the beginning, and competition is a spur to greater innovation.
Government agencies have a way of getting mired in outmoded ways of doing things. Bureaucracies can form whose major function seems to be furthering the organization.
Big businesses aren’t immune to these pitfalls, of course. Which is why innovators in both government and the private sector are most successful when they emulate small companies: doing more with less; streamlining the chain of command; incentivizing performance; and focusing narrowly on a well-defined mission–some of the things I’ll talk about in my speech tomorrow.
Location:Atlanta
Funding by governments can be a problem when times are hard like now. Also, there can be a lack of long-term vision in governments as they can’t see beyond the terms of their re-election. That’s partly why NASA is now bumming lifts from Russia and SpaceX since there was no foresight to see what would come after the Shuttle (and it’s days were numbered following the Challenger disaster).
Governments also don’t like committing to big-ticket projects. Apollo was an exception but it was, I was disappointed to learn many years later, a PR stunt to show America had leadership in space technology, putting the Russians in their place. The science was secondary. once the objective was achieved, funding was pulled.
The ISS is a project where the budget simply over-ran, again and again, and no one stopped the leak. Can we really say we’ve had $100 billion worth of science, innovation and technology for the investment?
Private companies are where the next major advance in manned space exploration will come. Many are run by wealthy entrepreneurs who grew up in the Apollo era and, I suspect, got tired of waiting for government to reignite the fires of manned spaceflight.
Government might actually get in the way of progress by making private enterprises adhere to overly-strict health and safety policies. We need a period similar to that when the first airplanes flew. There were casualties, unfortunately, but trial and error took us from the kitty Hawk glider to powered biplanes in a decade. Two decades after that, biplanes gave way to the fighter planes we know from WW2. And two decades after that, international jet travel was the norm. The majority of these innovations were carried out by individuals and private companies. Government got involved when it had to in WW2 to fund innovation. Now we need rocket and spacecraft technology to evolve at an equally fast pace to give us the spacefaring future we were all promised back in the 60s and 70s. And it’s the private companies that will do that.
I agree with much of what you say, Gary. Government can be wasteful and inefficient. But when government funded R&D works, it can work very well. The Internet is a great example of government building a technology before there was a market for it.
Your airplane example points to an other area where government can do a lot to foster emerging technologies. The first commercial airlines and pilots cut their teeth hauling the mail for the government. Air mail contracts provided a market where none existed before, giving a fledgeling industry an opportunity to mature with the help of government revenue. Charles Lindbergh was an airmail pilot before he flew the Atlantic.
The commercial contracts NASA has let to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences to serve the International Space Station constitute the 21st century equivalent of hauling the mail. They provide an important revenue stream to the newspace companies as they continue to develop their technologies (many of which were introduced in government space programs).
I think government and industry R&D both serve important roles. They work best when they can combine their best features to work together. Doesn’t always happen, I know!